Category Archives: Local Food System

Being a Lunatic Farmer

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Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer

BOOK REVIEW by Maureen Lefebvre

I LOVED this book. In another life I would be a lunatic farmer too – one who respects the land, respects animals and handles both with knowledge and the understanding that we cannot abuse the system and expect to get away with it forever. In conversation-like fashion Joel Salatin tells of his family business raising cows, chickens, and eggs on a sustainable farm in Virginia. Joel travels widely helping to make people aware that it is possible to feed our country without resorting to chemicals, feedlots and monocrops, mega-acre farms. In this book he includes his philosophy, research and resources as well as practical how-tos. Each chapter concludes with takeaway points. For example, chapter one is titled “Growing Soil”. The takeaway points were:

  1. Herbivores and perennials are the most efficacious way to build soil.
  2. Tillage and annuals account for the lion’s share of erosion.
  3. Depleted soil can be rebuilt and regenerated.
  4. Carbon is the key to soil health.

You don’t have to be a regular farmer to appropriate the wisdom in this book. Taking it to heart will help you better care for any size urban yard you have and give you an appreciation of the process behind organic farming and encourage you to support local suppliers of this type of produce and meat.

Watch FRESH Online for FREE This Week

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I have just received an email from Alice Jongerden. She helps run Home On The Range, a buyer’s club in Chilliwack, BC. The movie FRESH is offering a FREE week of viewing from January 26 to February 1, 2012. Below is a link to watch the movie FRESH plus a letter from the FRESH team.

Watch Fresh Online Free

Watch FRESH online for FREE from January 26 to February 1, 2012.

Dear FRESH Supporter,

Here at FRESH, we’re always looking for ways to build the good food movement and reach a tipping point where sustainable food is the rule, not the exception. So, we’d like to continue spreading the word with an exciting new initiative: FRESH is available for viewing online for FREE! For a limited time (we do need to pay our bills after all), you can access the full-length film from your desktop. The movie will be available for one week, from Thursday, January 26th through Wednesday, February 1st, so don’t wait to watch!

Watch FRESH for FREE

We hope that you will take the opportunity to enjoy the film and share it far and wide, with your friends, family, coworkers, school, baking club, gardening circle and more. After accessing the movie online, you’ll receive an exclusive link to purchase a FRESH DVD for home use for just $14.99, 50% off our regular price! Consider supporting FRESH and our work by buying or gifting a copy to someone you care about.

Cheers,
Ana and Crystal
The FRESH Team

What’s a Starving Student to do About Food?

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Recently, I was contacted by Mimi Nakamura, a fourth year journalism student at Thompson Rivers University. She was working on a story in her journalism class regarding local foods in Kamloops. After the interview, I started wondering if other people on a budget might find the information useful. Here is our interview.

1. How did you decide to start the website eatkamloops.org?
I started the eakamloops.org website because I was new to Kamloops and I was finding it difficult to find local food. I wondered if other newcomers were having the same problem. I was a member of the Weston A Price Foundation and decided I wanted to do more for my community so I became a WAPF Chapter Leader. Part of my responsibilities is to maintain a list of local food producers. (Local food producers can be found here.) Doing a website is beyond what the WAPF requires but I thought it would be easier for people to get information about local food this way.

2. Do you personally buy local food? If so, what do you usually get?
My family gets most of our fresh produce and meat locally. We look for organic, un-sprayed and/or pasture-based food. We tend to do large bulk purchases once or twice a year for dried goods and “exotic” foods. When we buy food from farmers we don’t know, we buy certified organic. We buy whole foods and avoid processed foods:
Winter Storage I
Winter Storage II
Presently, we produce a number of products for our own personal use: raw dairy, pastured eggs, pastured fowl, and some produce. We use organic grains, legumes and un-sprayed hay. We give the animals whole food supplements such as kelp, unrefined sea salt, oyster shells, rock minerals, etc.

3. What is the importance of consuming local food?
Local food is important but it is just as important how the food is grown. Ideally, buy local food that is grown using organic principles and/or pasture-based. What’s the good of “local” food that is loaded with herbicides and pesticides filling the local environment with poison? There is a new good reason to buy certified organic foods. Certified organic foods do not allow GMOs. There is mounting evidence that GMO crops are contaminating non-GMO crops, including organically grown crops. No one really knows what will happen to our ecosystem due to these changes in the basic genetic structure of our food crops. (This is a scary thought. These genetic changes are permanent and cannot be stopped.)

4. What is the challenge that local farmers are facing right now?
The greatest barrier for small farmers and ranchers is government regulators with their one-size-fits-all-regulations. We will not have a local food system if those guys get their way. Many of the regulations now needed in the Industrial Food System was caused by the practices of the Industrial Food System itself. I would like to see consumers being able to buy directly from the farmer or rancher without onerous government regulations. Read some of my postings on raw milk. Just remember, this issue has nothing to do with “safety” and everything to do with “control”. I talk about this sad state of affairs in Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick.

5. Do you have any suggestions for university students to buy local food but stay on their grocery budget? (Any suggestions for cheap but healthy local food diet?)
Everyone’s situation is different but I would suggest a student read 25 Steps to Nourishing Traditional Foods and Where to Start: Limited Time and Budget. The student should try to work on one new step every two weeks. Some steps are easy, others are costly, and some require planning. Many of these steps will save money in the short and long term. Having a stable household would be ideal but for many students this would be difficult. Before looking for “cheap” food, a student should get reacquainted with their kitchen and learn how to cook real food. Without the skills to cook whole foods, the food will go to waste which would be costly for the student. After the student masters cooking with whole ingredients, the student should stop eating processed foods out of the Industrial Food System. The Industrial Food System specializes in “cheap” convenience foods but the student will pay again and again with their health. Cheap food isn’t very cheap when a student is always sick and weak.

At the same time, my family eats extremely well, cheaply. We produce many expensive foods ourselves by putting in our own labor. We are very careful about how we feed and treat our animals so the food we produce is of the highest quality. Foods we do not produce ourselves, we get in bulk from quality sources. We eat our meals together at home and we almost never eat out. When we are traveling we bring our own food.

I have another suggestion for the starving students looking for good, cheap food. I just found a new website by Arabella Forge. She is the WAPF Melbourne Chapter Leader and has just written a new book called Frugavore. Unfortunately, her book is not available in North America yet, but her website is very helpful. Take the Frugavore Challenge!
Frugavore introduces modern readers to the fundamentals of peasant cuisine, in which nothing is wasted, every part of the animal eaten, abundance from the garden preserved in traditional ways, and delicious meals prepared from scratch with fresh, local ingredients.
Thumbs Up Book Reviews by Sally Fallon

Updated December 9, 2010: Wendell Berry has been writing passionately about local food and farming issues for over forty years. For more information please read Wrong Turn and Are you a producer or a consumer?

Updated Feburary 13, 2011: I got out of school during in the late 1980s during a really bad recession. It was impossible to find work and it was one of the reasons I ended up starting my own business. During those early years I read a book that changed the way I looked at money. The book is called Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicke Robin. I would highly recommend this book for any young person getting out on their own and trying to get control of their finances. I also got a chance to read Frugavore. It’s a fun book with great money saving recipes.

Pasture-to-Plate.com and the Chilcotin Plateau

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This summer I had the great pleasure of visiting the Chilcotin Plateau. We traveled through historic Gang Ranch, reputed at one time to be the largest ranch in the world, controlling four million acres. Dale Alsager wrote a book called The Incredible Gang Ranch. Dale Alsager talked about the problems facing the modern rancher. He felt the only way for a ranch to survive and be profitable in the present bureaucratic environment was to control the whole food system including: production, processing and distribution. Considering the modern complexity of completely controlling a food distribution system, I have rarely seen a small family-run company capable of this task. Pasture-to-Plate.com is one example.

Pasture-to-Plate.com was started by Felix and Jasmin Schellenberg, owners of Rafter 25 Ranch, located just north of Redstone, BC. Their ranch is beyond organic, chemical free, biodynamic and pasture based. The family has lived on the ranch for over 28 years. This is the “pasture” part of the business.

Felix and Jasmin Schellenberg have three daughters: Dominique, Barbara and Fiona Schellenberg which run different parts of the family business. Dominique runs Chezacut Wilderness Adventures, an ecotourism part of Rafter 25 Ranch. Barbara and Fiona help run the Drive Organics Retail Outlet and Ethical Kitchen and out of Vancouver, BC. This is the “plate” part of the business. These “spin-off” businesses have been described by Arthur Koestler and later Joel Salatin as holonic development.

Recently, I drove up to Redstone, BC for the grand opening of the Chilcotin Harvest Abbattoir. This is a beyond-state-of-the-art slaughtering facility. This facility has been the dream of Felix and Jasmin Schellenberg for many years. Big projects like this do not happen without help. The Schellenberg family enlisted the help of a Master Butcher from Switzerland. Jakob Jud moved his whole family to Redstone, BC and they all work at the abbattoir.

The Schellenberg family have a deep appreciation of the suffering of animals and want the animals to be as comfortable as possible before slaughtering. Long distance shipping is very stressful for animals so slaughtering on the ranch or very near the ranch is ideal. It’s also cost effective. (Unfortunately, our government regulators are not as concerned about the welfare of your dinner.) The amount of government regulation the family would have had to contend with boggles the mind. Controlling the processing of the food was the final part of the chain. This is the “to” part of the business.

I had a chance to try some of their products. I tried European-style Wieners, Bratwurst, Pepperoni, Bresaola, Land jäger, Jerky, and pork lard. If you are looking for cheap food, you will not find it here. If you want the highest quality product, made with organic additives, by extremely skilled people, this is the place to buy. Barbara Schellenberg is the Weston A Price Foundation Chapter Leader for Vancouver, BC so the family values nourishing traditional food preparation methods. Their products are traditional. Try their wieners if you want to know what a wiener should look and taste like.

If you follow the Specific Carbohydrate Diet please be careful to read the ingredient list. Their ingredients are the best you will find commercially but could cause problems for sensitive people. Just because the food is organic, pasture based, and made by knowledgeable people doesn’t mean the food will be problem free. I reacted to those same delicious wieners. It is possible something in the “organic spice mixture” was the problem. If you interested in what kind of additives can be put into an “organic spice mixture” please read Canadian Organic Standards: 32.311 Permitted Substances Lists. Be warned, it is a long document.

If you would like to read more about holonic business development please read two articles in the Stockman Grass Farmer: Ghost in the Machine and 50 Steers a Year is a Good Living. In the case of Pasture-to-Plate.com the “mother-ship” is the Rafter 25 Ranch.

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick

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A community that can feed itself is free. A community that cannot feed itself is not. It’s that simple.
Joel Salatin

Some people wonder why we go to such trouble to find local producers for our food. I have had people be surprised that we now want to grow our own food. Over the last few years, I have realized that it is getting harder and harder to get quality, unadulterated food. Part of the reason is our population is aging and farmers are retiring. Their children are not taking up farming and the farms and ranches are being sold as ranchettes to the rich. In the farming community this is called “the final harvest”.

Farm land is also being bought up and consolidated into the hands of a small number of food conglomerates. Here is a chart by Dr Philip Howard on the Organic Processing Industrial Structure, just in case you thought your favourite organic brand was safe from this restructuring. Probably the root of why it is getting difficult to get local food is increasing government regulation. Many farmers actually recommend to their sons and daughters not to farm because these rules are becoming so onerous.

As I have been researching this issue, I have found the rules and regulations regarding food production, processing and distribution are, in fact, very onerous and not always sensible. For example, we have the same rules for industrial chicken producers that are slaughtering 10,000 chickens a day as for your neighbour who is killing one chicken in her kitchen and wants to sell it to you. She can sell it to you but she becomes a criminal for doing so. Superficially this appears fair. One set of rules for everyone, regardless of scale. But many of the safety concerns that have made these regulations necessary have been caused by the Industrial Food System itself.

Another example is raw milk in BC. According to the judgment by The Honourable Madam Justice Gropper between Fraser Health Authority v. Jongerden, “there is no provision in British Columbia’s Public Health Act which creates a rebuttable presumption like that contained in s.25 of the Ontario Milk Act… Raw milk is deemed to be a health hazard by regulation… The Transitional Regulation, on the other hand, is quite clear that milk for human consumption which has not been pasteurized at a licensed dairy plant in accordance with the Milk Industry Act, is a health hazard.”

A health hazard. It is written in our laws that raw milk is a health hazard. No proof is required. It is assumed. This is bad news for anyone in BC who feeds raw milk to their children. This case should be appealed to the British Columbia Court of Appeal to get a ruling about whether the Fraser Health Authority has jurisdiction over a private, contractual agreement. If they do, Heaven help us. The arms of government are indeed long.

There has been talk at The Weston A Price Foundation about drafting a Family Farm Bill of Rights. This legislation would allow farmers and their families to grow and consume their own food and sell their products to their community without onerous government interference.

In some areas, this is known as farm gate sales. Here is an example of Legislation in BC called Food Safety Amendment (Farm Gate Sales) Act 2009 which appears to have died during the first reading. Legislation like this might save the family farm from extinction and ensure a healthy local food supply for our children. Unfortunately, history teaches us that the ruling class rarely give up their power without a fight.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
The Declaration of Independence

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
24. (1) Anyone whose rights or freedoms, as guaranteed by this Charter, have been infringed or denied may apply to a court of competent jurisdiction to obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances.
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

February 22, 2011: Here is some essays from Kimberly Hartke. She is the Weston A Price Foundation Publicist. She has posted a number of articles called Raw Milk Around the World. I particularly like the article by Sir Julian Rose, a vocal supporter of raw milk, which states: “If you are still in doubt about the benefits of real, fresh milk, you might be reassured to know that the Queen of England drinks nothing less.”

BC Supreme Court Gives Injunction Against Raw Milk

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Fraser Health Authority has won a permanent injunction from the BC Supreme Court against Home On The Range and contracted milker, Alice Jongerden, in Chilliwack, BC. The Abbotford News said:

B.C. Supreme Court Justice Miriam Gropper ruled farm operator Alice Jongerden is “willingly causing a health hazard” and must stop packaging or distributing raw milk or related products for human consumption.

Home On The Range argued an Ontario court ruling upholding a similar raw milk co-op there set a precedent exempting operations where members don’t pay directly. Members hoped a victory would effectively legalize raw milk in BC and allow more cow-shares to form. Nor, she said, did it matter that the co-op provides milk to members rather than via direct sale to the public. “The remedy for the respondents is to convince the government to change the legislation,” she found.

Gordon Watson is an active owner and member of the herd share co-operative. He stated that the raw milk with continue to flow. “We’re going to keep on dairying within the letter of the law” said herd share member Gordon Watson. “The threshold is in the milking room… That’s where she’s not allowed to handle milk for sale.”

The dairy herd is jointly owned by the shareholders. The dairy herd must be milked and cared for regardless of the ruling. There are many shareholders willing to come in and care for the diary cows which they all jointly own. Gordon Watson is one of about 400 shareholders of Home on the Range. He said: “The milking is continuing and people are getting the raw milk today. I will be taking responsibility for the packaging and distribution.”

I guess the next step for the government is to get injunctions against all 400 herd share members! I hope you are feeling really safe and protected with our government restricting your rights to co-own a herd of animals and enjoy the products from those animals. Just remember it’s for your own good. You are too ignorant to develop a safe food production and processing system on your own. That’s why they are called Fraser Health “Authority”, because they know what’s best for you. Your personal freedoms are secondary to their “good works”.

For other postings on this issue please read: Canadian Government Appeals Michael Schmidt’s Acquittal, Michael Schmidt, Raw Milk Activist, Acquitted!, and Raw Milk Contamination?.

Here are some links for more information:
The Bovine

As I have been following the raw milk story in the media, I have been surprised at how much misinformation is out there. There are so many factual errors in reporting it is hard to maintain respect and trust for media coverage. I have received an education about how issues are reported and twisted in the media. I have learned that only deeper research on a given topic will allow a person to understand complicated issues such as raw milk.

Updated April 4, 2010: Here is a link to read the judgment by Her Honourable Madam Justice Gropper by the “Petitioner”, Fraser Health Authority and the “Respondent”, Alice Jongerden DBA Home on the Range. Remember, granting an injunction is to restore the status quo ante which is to “make whole again someone whose rights have been violated”. In this case, it is the Fraser Health Authority “whose rights have been violated” and restored.

Kamloops Garden Box Project

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About a week ago Joel Dyck contacted me about his project to build box planters in Kamloops for FREE. If you are interested in having someone give you a box planter for your deck or patio please read the following outline for the Kamloops Garden Box Project. If you are interested in participating in this project, Joel’s contact information is below:

This project will be called Kamloops Garden Boxes. The purpose of this project is to get more people interested in small-scale urban gardening.

PHASE 1 Building the Garden Boxes The core of the project will be building garden boxes and giving them to a diverse group of people. I will start with a group of 11 families/participants and possibly have additional groups of eleven. To begin with I will need to build four different demonstration boxes and have at least eleven extras to get the first group started. I will aim to build the boxes out of recycled and reusable materials. I will learn to use an Alaskan Mill to make lumber out of waste wood primarily from trees killed by the Mountain Pine Beetle and the Tussock Moth. I have some designs drawn out already and hope to build boxes that will look somewhat natural out of mainly pine and fir. I will also weave a trellis of smaller boughs from wood that is recycled as yard waste when people prune their trees in the spring. I will ask for community support for wood, dirt, and compost. Kamloops has an excellent composting facility and a plethora of available compost.

PHASE 2 Gathering the Garden Box Community As previously mentioned, I will gather an initial group of eleven families/individuals. The idea is that they will be diverse in age, gardening experience, and in their homes. I specifically want to include people who are renters and live in small dwellings to promote gardening in smaller urban spaces. I will start by picking people I know and then ask them to refer other people who might be interested. I already have an extensive list of people who are interested in learning how to garden and others with a lifetime of experience, who want to learn new things. I want to set up this community with a wide range of experience so that they can help each other and work together. My job will be to set people up for gardening success in a community minded environment. I will be responsible for the following aspects of the project:
1. I will build the garden box and deliver it to the person/family.
2. I will provide guidance for setting up a small and realistic garden in their location with personal and email support.
3. I will give each participant a package that will include some basic advice as well as an overview of the project.
4. I will set up a feedback blog and monitor it until I can find a community member to follow through with this. The blog will be a place for all participants to communicate their successes.
5. I will provide some technical support for participants who might have some issues with using a blog and posting photos on the Internet.
6. I will share a positive spirit of kindness and have an open mind to whatever unique situations might arise. I want to provide the same kind of leadership that I would appreciate receiving.

Kamloops Garden Box Participants will be expected to:
1. Plant something edible in their box e.g. lettuce, squash, chives, etc.
2. Take pictures twice a month to measure progress or lack of it.
3. Post a picture and a small write up (perhaps asking for advice) on the blog at least once a month.
4. Take a final picture of produce when it is ready to eat.
5. Share at least one meal using produce with a friend/neighbor and post the recipe.
6. Share some produce with a person that they don’t know very well.
7. Send a thank you email to any sponsors and cc it to me so I know all the sponsors have received recognition.
8. Have an open-minded attitude towards small-scale gardening!

PHASE 3 BC Sustainable Energy Association Kamloops Energy Fair The third part of this project will be attending the BCSEA Kamloops Energy Fair as a presenter. I will build a wide array of boxes for the energy fair. Some of these boxes will be used as props and others as door prizes. I will use my existing documentation and presentation material to educate energy fair attendees about the project and how to build their own box or pursue a project that fits their lifestyle and living space. This would be the media capstone of the project and the time to share it with as many people as possible. This will be an opportunity to show some simple ways to make sustainable lifestyle choices and show evidence of the BCSEA’s mission in the community: “Our mission is to facilitate the transition to a sustainable energy future in British Columbia through education, advocacy and tangible community projects.”

PHASE 4 Education The fourth and final part of this project would be to document it and turn it in to a collective of lesson plans and presentation material. There will be opportunities to share it before, during and after the BCSEA Energy Fair. I will present the design and construction aspect to home school students prior to the Kamloops BCSEA Energy Fair. I hope to bring the project into the public school system as well. If I can get enough students interested it would be great to have a community of teenage gardeners bring the project to completion. Watching students combine building, gardening, and technology would be an excellent learning opportunity for me. Having this material and presenting it will give me invaluable teaching practice prior to my career as a shop teacher.

Project Director: Joel Dyck
Email: joelfish(a)hotmail.com
Sponsored by Garfield Weston Award and the Kamloops Chapter of BC Sustainable Energy Association

Updated July 8, 2010: I received an email update from Joel Dyck. The Kamloops (& Kelowna) Garden Boxes is now on Facebook.

Boxing Day: You Are What You Buy (Believe)

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christmas-2009

We try to make Christmas a simple affair with just a few presents for the girls. This year we made our Christmas decorations from colored paper. It is wonderful to watch the tree change each year as the girls learn how to make different decorations.

Boxing Day has a long history but is now primarily known as a shopping holiday in North America. I haven’t participated in Boxing Day “celebrations” for decades. But at this time of year, I can’t help but think about what we “buy into”, will make the world we live in.

I dream about a world where my needs can be met without those needs costing someone else dearly. I dream about food that will nourish the body and community that will nourish the spirit. I dream about producing food for our families in a way that won’t cost “the world”. I dream about a world where our children are surrounded by a caring loving community that thinks about our shared future.

How do we become more enlightened about our behaviors so we can live our dreams? How can we change our thinking so our actions will follow? Maybe we need to just “buy into” a new vision. Of course, this vision isn’t new but very old. Maybe we need to learn how to tame our technology and harness our brilliance. All the answers are out there, we just have to apply them.

While I was at the Weston A Price Foundation 2008 Conference in California, I had the opportunity to see some new ideas being worked out in the real world. I visited the Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, CA. They are running a Community Supported Kitchen (CSK). Jessica Prentice is one of the co-founders of Three Stone Hearth and author of Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection. I hope you enjoy an interview with Jessica Prentice Part I and Part II. If you would like to see inside the Community Supported Kitchen run by Three Stone Hearth please watch Business With Passion.

People who feel themselves in chains, with no hope of ever getting them off, want to put chains on everyone else.
John Holt

Joel Salatin’s Vision of a Local Food System

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This last weekend I had the great pleasure of meeting Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm. He was speaking to a sold-out crowd hosted by the Cowichan Agricultural Society in Duncan, BC. Joel Salatin speaks passionately about family run, grass-based farming. In his own words, he is “in the redemption business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the economy, and healing the culture.” The guiding principles behind “Polyface are:
TRANSPARENCY: Anyone is welcome to visit the farm anytime. No trade secrets, no locked doors, every corner is camera-accessible.
GRASS-BASED: Pastured livestock and poultry, moved frequently to new “salad bars,” offer landscape healing and nutritional superiority.
INDIVIDUALITY: Plants and animals should be provided a habitat that allows them to express their physiological distinctiveness. Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health.
COMMUNITY: We do not ship food. We should all seek food closer to home, in our foodshed, our own bioregion. This means enjoying seasonality and reacquainting ourselves with our home kitchens.
NATURE’S TEMPLATE: Mimicking natural patterns on a commercial domestic scale insures moral and ethical boundaries to human cleverness. Cows are herbivores, not omnivores; that is why we’ve never fed them dead cows like the United States Department of Agriculture encouraged (the alleged cause of mad cows).
EARTHWORMS: We’re really in the earthworm enhancement business. Stimulating soil biota is our first priority. Soil health creates healthy food.”

My husband Shaen has read most of Joel Salatin’s books, so much of the information in the lecture wasn’t new to him. Near the end of the lecture, Shaen asked Joel Salatin if there was any big differences in his thinking now compared to when he wrote his books. Joel Salatin answered that in the past he believed thousands of farmers would communicate directly with customers. But most farmers find marketing and distribution very difficult and don’t like the work. Now he sees “clusters of farms” working with “local streams of marketing and distribution”. Joel talked about a six part system for a successful local food supply: producer, processor, accountant, marketer, distributor and customer. My husband and I looked at each other and wondered if there is a place for GO BOX Storage and eatkamloops.org in this new vision.

We realized we could become a local food distribution center for Kamloops. We could form a buyer’s group for Kamloops. We could increase the size of our orders and get better prices for everyone. We could run pocket markets or personal deliveries for a cost. If you do not know about pocket markets please read: Pocket Market Toolkit.

It was exciting thinking that we could become part of a successful local food system which helps all of us get the best in local food at a reasonable price. If we could develop a successful local food system, Joel Salatin believes “we could give the big-box stores a run for their money.”

Update November 25, 2009: I contacted Sally Fallon and asked if she knew of anyone who could mentor me to start a buyer’s group for Kamloops. She suggested John Moody who started a buyer’s club called Whole Life Buying Club. Before a new member can join the Whole Life Buying Club, they recommend the new member watch The Story of Stuff. The Whole Life Buying Club follows a Food Philosophy which defines the type of products the buying club will bring in for members. John Moody has written an essay for the journal Wise Traditions called Building a Local Food Buying Club.

Updated December 23, 2009: I have just learned from Sandra Burkholder that Joel Salatin will be coming to Quesnel, BC on March 27, 2010. Joel Salatin will be speaking at the 2nd Annual Poultry and Rabbit Forum being put on by the Cariboo Central Interior Poultry Producers Association. Sandra Burkholder and her husband Chris Newton are building a earthship house in Darfield, BC. An earthship house is made from recycled materials and is designed to be completely self-sufficient housing system requiring no outside support. The earthship is the brain child of Mike Reynolds of Earthship Biotecture.

Updated February 28, 2010: I found a series about Polyface Farm on Watch.MeetTheFarmer.TV. You will get a personal tour of Polyface Farm with Joel Salatin. There is an incredible amount of information in this video series about his pasturing systems for the watchful viewer. He will go into the types of grasses and herbage plus the effect of mass group grazing and resting of the pasture. He goes in to some theory but most of the videos are very practice. If you are interested in the theory behind his practices please read his books for more information. Here is Part I, Part II and Part III.

[The road to] hell is paved with good intentions.
English Proverbs