Blueberry Picking for Marion Polk Food Share

Pound for pound, one of the best foods in the world, and we live where they grow best. Image via Wikipedia

Bringing in the blueberries

WHEN: First thing in the morning (after 8 a.m. please), till dark, Wed Aug 26. Come when you can, pick what you can, and help get the harvest to the hungry.

WHERE: The homeowner has generously donated the produce from 1100 blueberry bushes. The bushes are located at 8098 Pudding Creek Dr. SE, Salem. To get there from Salem, head east on McClay Road until you get near McClay. Before the McClay Inn and before the railroad tracks, turn right on 82^nd St. Go ¾ of a mile and turn right on Pudding Creek Dr. SE. The berries are next to a U-Pick farm. On the other side of the berries is a manufactured home. There will be a Marion Polk Food Share sign on the road.

WHAT: You will see cardboard boxes to assemble and pick into, for the Food Share. In the box marked "VOLUNTEERS," you will find tape to make the boxes (flats), and waivers of liability. Please sign in, leave the paperwork in the box, and start picking. Be sure to put tape over the holes in the boxes so berries won't fall out.

THEN WHAT: Pick into the boxes. You may keep a reasonable amount for your own home use. When a box is full, stack it with other boxes by the maple tree on the east side of the field. This tree is by the arborvitae hedge and is marked with something shiny. By stacking the boxes under the tree, where they can get air circulation out of the sun, they will remain relatively fresh till they can be picked up by Marion Polk Food Share the following morning. Thank you for your willingness to help!

"Let Them Eat Natural Restoration Areas"

Five members of the Salem City Council tonight sold us out for cash money tonight, approving a move by the feds to put natural restoration "emergency flood control" easements on 200 acres of unique farmland within the Salem city limits, land that has been cropped for more than a century and that has never cost the federal government a single dollar in flood damage claims.

UPDATE: A reader asks a good question, now that self-styled environmentalists have blessed ignoring master plans and blowing off public involvement when it suits them: "Wonder how knee-jerk supporters of this easement would have felt about the need for public involvement and planning if the proposal had been for $800K in exchange for two separate motocross playgrounds in the middle of the park?" Of course they'll respond, "That's different," but actually the only difference is that one proposal they like and one would horrify them.

IRONY UPDATE: Here's text of a proclamation issued the same night the council voted to forever bar community gardens and all other forms of agriculture from 200 acres of prime land in Minto-Brown Park:

National Community Gardening Week 2009 Proclamation

WHEREAS, one of the most frequent and best-supported recommendations by health experts is that Americans need to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables; and

WHEREAS, Salem is located in the very heart of one of the most fertile and productive river valleys anywhere on earth, and our soils and growing climate are among the most favorable in the world; and

WHEREAS, fruits and vegetables grown in the soils and climate of Salem provide unmatched flavor and superior nutrition; and

WHEREAS, community gardens help community members help themselves by providing both a fulfilling, enjoyable avocation and an affordable source of superior nutrition without the need for fossil fuels in transport; and

WHEREAS, gardening together in community helps foster stronger ties between diverse community groups, promotes healthy eating habits for a lifetime, and helps support efforts to eradicate hunger in Oregon; and

WHEREAS, the United States Secretary of Agriculture has recognized and encouraged all Americans to celebrate this week as National Community Gardening Week;

NOW, THEREFORE, be it resolved that I, Janet Taylor, Mayor of the City of Salem, proclaim National Community Gardening Week, August 23-29, 2009.

I encourage all residents to take advantage of Salem's community gardens and gardening resources and thank the many Master Gardener volunteers, neighborhood community garden coordinators, and the Marion Polk Food Share Community Gardening program making our community healthier, happier, and more beautiful.

“National Community Gardening Week”
DATED this 24th day of August, 2009

As Salem prepares to forever ban agriculture from 200 acres of rich farmland

Salem's commitment to ending hunger --- one sticker deep at most. Image by ginnerobot via Flickr

Before leaping into the fantasy solutions proposed below (skyscraper soilless gardens anyone?), shouldn't we try at least preserving some of the land we have been farming successfully for 150 years?

Funny how many people in Salem seem to think that hunger elsewhere won't mean problems here. Apparently for these people, Salem exists in a perfect bubble, untethered to a world where more than a billion people go hungry regularly -- with billions more expected soon, including millions of Americans and thousands of Oregonians.

Just as we're recognizing how difficult feeding a world of 7 billion is, Salem is proposing to knock out 200 acres of prime, well-situated close-in farmland. Because, to some of the well-fed, "natural re$toration" dollars count more than other peoples' hunger, even when those hungry people are right here in Salem.

If climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist. This means that the majority of people could soon be without enough food or water. . . .

The floods and droughts that have come with climate change are wreaking havoc on traditional farmland. Three recent floods (in 1993, 2007 and 2008) cost the United States billions of dollars in lost crops, with even more devastating losses in topsoil. Changes in rain patterns and temperature could diminish India's agricultural output by 30 percent by the end of the century.

What's more, population increases will soon cause our farmers to run out of land. The amount of arable land per person decreased from about an acre in 1970 to roughly half an acre in 2000 and is projected to decline to about a third of an acre by 2050, according to the United Nations. With billions more people on the way, before we know it the traditional soil-based farming model developed over the last 12,000 years will no longer be a sustainable option.

Irrigation now claims some 70 percent of the fresh water that we use. After applying this water to crops, the excess agricultural runoff, contaminated with silt, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, is unfit for reuse. The developed world must find new agricultural approaches before the world's hungriest come knocking on its door for a glass of clean water and a plate of disease-free rice and beans. . . .

Local Heroes: Urban Foraging

Image via Wikipedia

Cool. Nice story on STIR member Jake Kosker and the other urban foragers in Salem.

. . . Kosker is part of a growing movement that touts the sweetness of fruit picked from street trees, local parks or neighbor's yards that would otherwise go to waste.

Urban foraging could be as simple as picking blackberries at a local park or as involved as Kosker's daily trek for plums, cherries, hazelnuts and walnuts through the alleys of his northeast Salem neighborhood.

Web sites such as www.neighborhoodfruit.com, www.veggietrader.com and Portland's www.urbanedibles.org have popped up throughout the country, providing maps and encouraging city dwellers to forage for urban fruit. From a local food standpoint, it's hard to get more local than your own neighborhood. . . .

Marion-Polk Food Share launched its own urban harvest team last year to pick neighborhood fruit trees.

The food bank often gets calls from homeowners who don't have the time or physical ability to keep up with the harvest, said Kat Daniel who runs the program as part of the Women Ending Hunger campaign.

"We have people calling saying, 'we have this plum tree. Can you pick this plum tree?' " she said.

Now they can. She hopes to expand the program to include more volunteer harvesting teams so they don't have to turn jobs away during peak times. . . .

The future of eating: Hint, it requires land

We can get away from using fossil fuels in agriculture; what we can't do is get away from needing land where food can be grown. BBC has a nice piece that shows that cities can again become food secure --- but it means putting a priority on using land for food rather than parking or "nature" (as if agriculture wasn't as natural to humans as scratching is to dogs).

Climate change, drought, population growth - they could all threaten future food supplies. But global agriculture, with its dependence on fuel and fertilisers is also highly vulnerable to an oil shortage, as Cuba found out 20 years ago.

Around Cuba's capital Havana, it is quite remarkable how often you see a neatly tended plot of land right in the heart of the city.

Sometimes smack bang between tower block estates or next door to the crumbling colonial houses, fresh fruit and vegetables are growing in abundance.

Some of the plots are small - just a few rows of lettuces and radishes being grown in an old parking space.

Other plots are much larger - the size of several football pitches. Usually they have a stall next to them to sell the produce at relatively low prices to local people.

Twenty years ago, Cuban agriculture looked very different. Between 1960 and 1989, a national policy of intensive specialised agriculture radically transformed Cuban farming into high-input mono-culture in which tobacco, sugar, and other cash crops were grown on large state farms.

Cuba exchanged its abundant produce for cheap, imported subsidised oil from the old Eastern Bloc. In fact, oil was so cheap, Cuba pursued a highly industrialised fuel-thirsty form of agriculture - not so different from the kind of farming we see in much of the West today.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the oil supply rapidly dried up, and, almost overnight, Cuba faced a major food crisis. Already affected by a US trade embargo, Cuba by necessity had to go back to basics to survive - rediscovering low-input self-reliant farming.

City allotments

Oxen replaced tractors when Cuba became a low-fuel economy

With no petrol for tractors, oxen had to plough the land. With no oil-based fertilizers or pesticides, farmers had to turn to natural and organic replacements.

Today, about 300,000 oxen work on farms across the country and there are now more than 200 biological control centres which produce a whole host of biological agents in fungi, bacteria and beneficial insects.

Havana has almost 200 urban allotments - known as organiponicos - providing four million tons of vegetables every year - helping the country to become 90% self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables.

Alamo Organiponico is one of the larger co-operatives employing 170 people, which was built on a former rubbish-tip that produces 240 tons of vegetables a year.

There are a wide range of crops planted side by side and brightly coloured marigolds at the edges.

Car parks and rubbish tips have become vegetable plots

"We produce all different kinds of vegetables," says farmer Emilio Andres who is proud of the fact that his allotment feeds the local community.

"We sell to the people, the school, the hospital, also to the restaurant and the hotel too.

"It's important because it's grown in the city, it's fresh food for the people, it's healthy food, and it provides jobs for the people here too.

"We don't spray any chemicals. We only spray biological means like bastilos - a bacteria and fungus to kill the pests. And we use repellent plants like marigolds to keep away the pests.

"When I see all of these healthy crops, without too many pests, grown without any chemicals, it's amazing for me - I am making a contribution for the people that get healthy crops, healthy products."

Healthy diet

The organiponico uses raised beds filled with about 50% high-quality organic material (such as manure), 25% composted waste such as rice husks and coffee bean shells, and 25% soil.

A Western diet includes about three times as much food energy from animal products like meat and dairy

As well as marigolds, basil and neem trees are planted around the containers to keep the aphids and beetles at bay. Sunflowers and corn are also planted around the beds to attract beneficial insects such as lady bugs and lace wings. Sticky paper or plastic funnel-shaped bottles are positioned throughout the beds to trap harmful pests that do get into the garden.

And the methods work. Lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, squash, sweet potatoes, spinach herbs and many other crops are grown in huge quantities and sold cheaply. . . .

Sunday, 8/23 -- Garden of Imagination Party!

In light of International Kitchen Garden Day and National Community Garden Week, Marion Polk Food Share is celebrating the summer of garden bounty with a program that offers something for everyone.

• 9 am-noon: The art of organic community food production (MPFS garden work/learn-party)
  
  
• noon-1 pm: Ribbon cutting and “taste of the garden” ceremony.
  
  
• 1 pm-4 pm: Building of the OSD cob garden bench (community building workshop)
  
  
• 4 pm-6 pm: STIR community garden bike tour

Music, Food and Community Building activities will be going on all day.

2009 Chefs' Nite Out Tickets on sale now through October 1.
$65 prior to August 1st, $75 after August 1st.

Jordan Blake
Garden Project Manager
Phone: 503.581.3855
Direct: 503.373.9660

Marion-Polk Food Share leading the fight to END hunger in Marion and Polk counties
... because no one should be hungry.

(And there will be a proclamation for National Community Gardening Week given at the City Council meeting at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, August 24 at City Hall in Salem.)

A procurement and systems analyst perspective on single-payer

One of the key reasons US manufacturing declines is that it has to compete with manufacturing in countries who don't tie health insurance to employment, relieving their employers of a huge cost burden. Image via Wikipedia

A friend whose father was a highly successful systems analyst and procurement expert for top socialist organizations (IBM and the Pentagon) took a look at health care from a systems perspective and came up with single-payer as the answer.

Top Ten Reasons Why We Absolutely Need Single Payer Healthcare

1. It will be much easier to get everyone covered without people being shuttled around seeking coverage and falling through the cracks, or suffering delayed approval and care when they become expensively sick. The dollar savings from eliminating this wasted time and effort will be significant in and of itself.

2. It will allow doctors to concentrate on patients, not their billing and collection problems as currently driven by multiple insurance providers with different requirements and paperwork.

3. It will make it possible, through compensation adjustments, to rebalance the number of medical practitioners by area of specialization to better meet the needs of the patient base. It also facilitates payment based on quality (outcomes), not just quantity of care.

4. It will facilitate, through payment incentives, improvement in the availability of health care services in currently underserved areas.

5. Because of the enhanced auditing capability inherent in a single payer system, it allows the day to day billing and collection process to be run on a presumption of integrity and honesty, thereby greatly simplifying procedures and paperwork for all involved.

6. It will create an environment where the pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment suppliers will be forced to deal with a very competent customer, instead of a group of disorganized ones.

7. It will create a situation where common accounting standards, utilizing direct costing principles and practices, can be implemented at hospitals, thereby linking costs and billing with services provided.

8. Once the payment process is centralized, it will facilitate meaningful analysis to identify cost drivers in all areas so effort can be concentrated on fixing them.

9. It will converts the twenty to twenty-five cents of every premium dollar currently expended by private insurers on excessive salaries, administration, advertising and profit into payment for healthcare services. This goes a long way toward paying for the fifty million people to be covered.

10. All of the above subjects are or should be part of a real health care reform effort, in fact, they are vital components. However, none of them have been or realistically can be accomplished (have a snowballs chance in hell) utilizing a process with private insurers as its backbone.

Hello, City of Salem! Walkable Neighborhoods Increases Home Values

You can find old houses that were once beautiful throughout poorer sections of Salem, nearly always abutting high speed roads that have destroyed the homes along the streets that ferry the well-to-do to their neighborhoods across town. Image by McMorr via Flickr

And that increases property tax revenues. This isn't hard, people -- the value of homes are inversely proportional to the average speeds on the streets they front.

Most of what city officials do these days in the name of "planning" consists of figuring out ways to cater to the automobiles of people in well-off neighborhoods at the expense of people in less-well-off neighborhoods, imposing "mobility standards" that essentially offer up the neighborhoods of the poor and minority areas as high-speed sacrifice zones for the richer people to drive through (with monstrous "improvements" naturally slated for these areas, where the people are too poor to fight back).

Look at any decrepit section of a residential area where there are once-beautiful homes oddly close to the roads -- you will find that these were once grand homes but, when the road got wider, they became rentals and then meth dens and now sit as reproachful monuments to our "Auto Uber Alles" idea of city planning.

Shameful. And stupid.

UPDATE: Hat tip to RR for this:

"UGB expansions involve big stakes. Expansions can cost taxpayers hundreds of millions in new infrastructure and services, reduce quality of life, damage natural areas and increase global warming. But developers and land speculators can cash in on a sometimes 10-fold increase in land values." --- John Platt, Helvetia Winery

From Planning for Sprawl: Staff study betrays bias for unbridled development, by Alan Pittman Eugene Weekly.

Imagine Minto's Ag Acreage as the Super Farm-to-School Lunch Site

This is the kind of food kids need, and that kids love if they get to help grow it. Image via Wikipedia

There's widespread recognition that the school lunch program reflects the worst of our country's agricultural policies, which are firmly in control of Big Agribusiness and operate to the detriment of all eaters, especially the most vulnerable ones, children. Schools are used as a dumping ground for surplus goods more than as a place where children might learn healthy eating habits.

Lost in the rush to grab a tiny few stimulus dollars under an "emergency flood control" easement by locking away 200 acres of rich, prime farmland in Minto Brown Island Park is any effort to see the possibilities for addressing numerous social ills by keeping the land as agricultural land. Not least among these is the chance to convert that acreage into community gardens and even into a unique opportunity to promote better nutrition in schoolchildren by giving over as much acreage as needed to growing food for school breakfast/lunch programs year-round (especially in summer when many poor children suffer a huge drop in nutrition).

The ag land on Minto can become the centerpiece of a revitalized curriculum that teaches kids (and the adults who care for them) not only about the benefits of good food but also how to grow that food in a way that preserves and protects the environment, while building up kids' sense of themselves as people who have a purpose and who contribute to the wellbeing of their families. The loss of useful chores -- tending the kitchen gardens, caring for hens -- is one of the saddest things about childhood today, where children are trapped in an auto-dominated world that imprisons them in their cul-de-sacs with nothing useful to do. Sure, there's make work chores, but they don't build a sense of agency and responsibility the way meaningful contributions do.

UPDATE: A must-read book is available from the Salem Public Library and our local booksellers: "This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader" by Joan Dye Gussow. (Chelsea Green Press). This is outstanding, wily writing, with lots of tempting recipes, leading the reader gently, painlessly, but inexorably into thinking deeply about food and where it is grown and the costs of our obliviousness to those things. Blurb by Barbara Kingsolver, whom many consider a Goddess of Food Writing:

The most important book I've read in a long while. Full of hope, kindness, and arresting wisdom, it iwill serve as a valuable guide to anyone who wants to live more thoughtfully on the only planet that feeds us.

Bad Precedent Rising: Still time to speak out

This is an old Oregon plat map. One of the very first and most important acts of government in North America has been platting land and defending those boundaries. Image by Beaverton Historical Society via Flickr

Sometimes it seems that there's simply no idea so bad that some body of elected officials won't embrace it heartily, despite its gross defects.

Take rewarding people who poach public park land, for instance. One of the first and oldest principles in law is that you cannot obtain title to government land by adverse possession. This reflects a deep and historically unbroken recognition that public land is a special form of public trust. That is, it's not just that the land is valuable, the way cash is valuable. It's more that public lands are irreplaceable, and public officials are simply trustees for that land for the rest of us, caretakers in other words; it is not theirs to give away to their friends, campaign contributors, or even sympathetic but careless homeowners who encroach on it.

The Marion County Commissioners appear determined to make the worst caricatures of politicians come to life as they, against all reason and advice, try to create a terrible precedent by giving away something that is not theirs to give, stealing it from the rest of us and violating their oaths of office to do so:

Problems arise when squatters claim public land. Squatting is like stealing because it is taking possession of something that doesn’t belong to you.

In spite of that basic truth, Marion County Commissioners are considering giving public land to property owners who have no claim to it.

The hearing on this case is called: PLA/FP/Greenway Case No. 09-017

And it is taking place Wednesday, August 19 (tomorrow), at 4PM, at the County Building; 555 Court Street, Main Floor.

Here’s the background:

Property owners bought property next to Spong’s Landing (a county park) and fenced off some of the park land.

In May 2008, Marion County Public Works wrote to the property owners ordering them to remove the sections of their fence that enclosed a part the park. The property owners appealed and asked the County to give them title to the enclosed park land.

This required a hearing where NO ONE testified in favor of yielding the park land. In spite of the public outcry, the commissioners voted to sell the land to the property owners for $5000.

Concerned citizens put up the money and filed an appeal with the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA). LUBA agreed with the citizens and told the commissioners to find another solution.

Now the commissioners are simply redrawing the Spong’s Landing property line and giving the park land to the property owners.

Giving park land away like this is extremely unusual. There are no provisions for it in the Comprehensive Plan and the Marion County Parks Commission objects to it. It doesn’t serve the public interest, and it ignores the unanimous will of the people.

The Commissioners could have followed the rules and supported staff’s legal notice ordering the property owners to vacate the park land. Instead they have let the matter drag on for several months and consume thousands of dollars of public funds.

The Commissioners should stick to the rules.

Please attend or testify that the property line adjustment be DENIED.

Testifying is one way you can claim standing if there needs to be another appeal.

For more information contact: Aileen Kaye, 503-743-4567