agriculture

Practicing An Honorable Harvest

Happy Harvest Moon! It’s also Friday the 13th, which, if you’re so inclined, could potentially make for a spooky night. What I think is even more interesting, however, is its relation to the autumnal equinox and its cultural tradition (I absolutely love learning new things).

According to Almanac.com, the full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal equinox (September 22-23) is the Harvest Moon. This means a Harvest Moon could occur in either September or October, depending on its lunar timing. During these shortening of days the moon rises just moments after the sun sets and gives us a sense of brighter evenings. In times past, farmers appreciated this extra light for harvesting their crops; thus the name Harvest Moon.

Isn’t the harvest season a most glorious time of year? Besides the beauty of autumn, there is just that—the harvest. All around us is the culmination of summer’s sunshine and rain, the miracle of growth, and, of course, the hard work of our hands.

The Harvest is Truly a Blessing

Author Robin Wall Kimmerer spoke of this blessing in her awesome book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. As a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, she strives for a life of gratitude. Whether it’s the ramps she foraged from a woods in spring or the tomatoes I pick from my garden this fall, everything we consume, everything that allows us to live, is the gift of another life.

Honorable Harvest

Kimmerer wrote of the Honorable Harvest, a canon of ancient principles that govern our taking from the earth. As she lists its guidelines, I’m thinking they could well apply to sustainable living.  
  1. Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
  2. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
  3. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
  4. Never take the first. Never take the last.
  5. Take only what you need.
  6. Take only that which is given.
  7. Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
  8. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
  9. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
  10. Share.
  11. Give thanks for what you have been given.
  12. Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
  13. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
Obviously, the Honorable Harvest isn’t a guideline just for our own taking. It’s also for our giving. In biblical times God instructed his people to leave corners of the field unharvested for the poor to glean, a practice my Latino friends say is common in their home countries still today. Here in the U.S, CSA farms add creative ways of gleaning to their calendars and community farms are dedicated to providing to food pantries. Goodness, simply sharing our garden produce with family and friends is an honorable harvest!

The Honorable Harvest is something we can apply to all areas of our lives. Wouldn’t it be cool if it was as much an autumn celebration as, say, commercial holiday-ism in our stores?

Expanding Our Octoberfest to Minnesota

We certainly love our local brews. However, a few weeks ago my husband received a birthday gift of assorted Oktoberfest beers from outside our WiscoBeer realm. They say it’s good to expand your thinking, so in preparation for our upcoming Octoberfest Brewery Tour we’re “working” to expand our palettes. Yes, sigh, it’s a tough, tough job.

This year we’re also expanding our brewery tour. In addition to our annual celebration of sipping and scenery, we’re including the Women In Sustainable Agriculture (WISA) Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota.

What a great conference this will be—fabulous women from across the country gathering to exchange ideas, find resources, and network. I’m super proud to be amongst them and presenting the workshop Be a Better Self-Promoter. Do join us!

But For Now, Let’s Talk Beer!

The Mississippi River region is truly glorious in October. After sampling the Twin Cities’ great selection of brews, we’re heading downstream to Fountain City, a cozy community nestled between the river and Wisconsin’s towering bluffs. Here we’re planning a few days of river exploration, state park hiking, and, of course, more sampling.

So Many to Sample

To the delight of beer enthusiasts everywhere, the number of craft breweries continues to grow. Each year as I plan our tour the number of venues seems to have doubled from the year before. Most interesting is the creative entrepreneurship of these small businesses; like, for example, the symbiotic partnership between taprooms and food trucks, which is a tasty win-win for breweries, food trucks and customers alike.

This all leaves us with a hardly-unfortunate dilemma: With so many breweries in Western Wisconsin/Eastern Minnesota, how does one choose? I’ve decided to prioritize our sampling to 1) interesting ambiance (I do like my historic architecture, you know) and 2) if the brewery was featured in Taproom Travelers videos (again, gotta love that creative entrepreneurship).

Promo of My Own

In the spirit of practicing what I’ll be preaching at the upcoming WISA Conference, may I present my 2019 Octoberfest Brewery Tour poster!

Each year as a personal exercise, I design a poster commemorating our tour (check out more of them here). This keeps me in touch with the industry and brings an added element of fun to our travels. Posters are great keepsakes for any event.

Perhaps you have an event you’d like to promote? Or maybe a new line of beverage you’d like to brand? Drop me a line!

Out and About with Fermentation Fest

News flash!

Fermentation Fest event guides are hot off the press and heading out to exciting venues throughout Wisconsin. This 24-pg, can’t-miss guide is bubbling with interesting articles, art, class listings and city map—all the ingredients necessary for two weekends of culture convergence at Fermentation Fest. You don’t want to miss the Fest or the guide!

I’ve got to say helping promote Fermentation Fest is one of my favorite projects of the year. It’s a melding of interests, from food and art, to agriculture and travel. This means artists, chefs, poets, foodies, farmers, cheesemakers, brewers, musicians, performers, and so many more people all come together for an autumnal celebration of good life. I’m very proud to design for it, very honored to be part of it.

In the weeks ahead I’ll be delivering guides to various venues (I love promoting my clients!). Check back to this page often for an updated listing of where you can find them. And don’t forget my social media because I’m also big on featuring interesting venues.

Here’s where I’ve been so far. Yep, all the way to northern Wisconsin!

#GetYourFermFestGuide2019Here

Listed in order of cities are venues where you can find Fermentation Fest guides. If you’re not in these areas, check out the Fermentation Fest website or join the mailing list.

Deerfield Coffeehouse, Deerfield
Milwaukee Street Traders, Delafield
Fitchburg Public Library, Fitchburg
Sequoya Public Library, Madison
Willy Street Co-op East, Madison
Willy Street Co-op North, Madison
ZuZu Cafe & Market, Madison
Willy Street Co-op, Middleton
Good Harvest Market, Pewaukee
Roots Coffee Bar, Oconomowoc
Soleil Lune Yoga Center, Oconomowoc
Firefly Coffee House, Oregon
The Chocolate Caper, Oregon
Landmark Creamery, Paoli (Belleville)
Stevens Point Area Co-op, Stevens Point
Cafe Coco, Washburn
South Shore Brewery, Washburn
Tribeca GalleryCafe & Books, Watertown
Downtown Grocery, Wausau

See you at Fermentation Fest in October!

Putting Value on Our Food

Last weekend I harvested my winter wheat. I felt all Winslow Homer Reaper-ish while using an antique scythe I found hanging in our barn.

My wheat field—call it what you will—was a 20 x 20 ft. patch of amber waves of grain within my vegetable garden. I broadcast-planted it last fall using Turkey Red seed from Anarchy Acres and was ecstatic when this spring it came up as lush as any of the neighboring fields. My reasoning for this cover crop experiment is to put nutrients back into the soil during the summer and then come winter—when the north wind doth blow—I can cozy up with wheat weaving and a slice of homegrown bread. Oh, how hygge of me, eh?

Larry Newberg family tree collection

Well, surprise, surprise, harvesting this little patch turned out to be a lot of work—scything the stalks, gathering them into sheaves, hanging them to dry, threshing grains from the head—seriously, what was I thinking? When I see pictures of my Swedish ancestors working large fields completely by hand, I’m in awe.

Today, even as mechanized as farming has become, there are still segments that require laboring by hand just as a they did a century ago. Interestingly, these are the segments that most directly feed humans, especially those that feed us healthy, organic food.

The True Value of Food

In the spring issue of Yes!, the Journalism for People Building a Better World, an industrious food composter, Kevin Holtham, said “I believe food should be free, and actually it can be free.” I see where he’s coming from, how growing one’s own food enables us to, in a sense, eat for free.

However, “free” is a highly contingent word. Sure, growing your own food saves you from having to buy it from a store. But it’s certainly not free if you apply value to the time, labor and resources necessary to get out there and do the growing. Let’s be real, there’s a lot more to producing that tasty tomato than meets the Instagram eye.

As an organic farmer making her living from the land, Casey O’ Leary of Earthly Delights Farm & Snake River Seed Cooperative agrees.

“’Food should be free’ is dangerously close to ‘food should be cheap,’ and both completely undervalue the work of food production and the humans doing it,” commented O’ Leary so eloquently in the next issue of Yes! “Access to healthy food should be a human right? Absolutely. Food should be free? Nope. It smacks of the kind of romanticism of farming only possessed by those who have never tried to make a living doing it, and it undermines our efforts to advocate for a living wage for farmers and farmworkers.”

O’ Leary hits a sensitive nerve. When it comes to food, generally speaking, we Americans are a demanding lot. We want our food—an abundant selection, at that— but, heaven forbid, not only do we not want to do the work to produce it, we also don’t want to pay much for others to do it for us. In truth, Americans pay far less of their income for food than other people of the world, yet our health care spending is so much more. Obviously, the food we’re buying isn’t as healthy as it should be. And obviously, cheap (processed) food doesn’t pay.

Maybe that old scythe is a reminder.

Food author Michael Pollan instructs us to eat like our great-great-great grandmothers ate. To be sure, these lovely ladies didn’t open plastic packaging to get at their food. Neither should we. Remember, the foods that are the healthiest for us to eat often require the greatest effort to produce.

https://farmersmarketcoalition.org/national-farmers-market-week/

Next week, August 4-10, is National Farmers Market Week. Here’s a chance for Americans to show that, yes, we do value good food and we support the farmers who work hard to grow it.

Looking for a farmers market near you? Check out this national farmers market directory. It’s where you can find food in its purest, healthiest form; unprocessed and produced by human hands.

Go for it!

Lots of Summer Ramblings: Strawberry Moon to Strawberry Festivals

Several years ago the bulb in our yard light burned out. It was one of those dawn-to-dusk lights set high on a line pole and even though my husband’s job is to regularly climb such poles, he just never got around to climbing ours.

At first, I’d go out at night and it seemed unnervingly dark. We don’t have immediate neighbors so nothing but the celestial sky lit our yard. Oh, but let me tell you, there’s no going back. The event of that burned-out bulb has totally heightened my appreciation of the night sky and I’m now a moon-gazing habitué.

Given that, here’s to a happy Strawberry Moon (Tuesday night) and upcoming Summer Solstice (Friday night). I love them both. With the full days of summer ahead, it’s a wonderful time of festivity and adventure.

Speaking of Strawberries…

They’re finally here! We live on a windy hill and it seems my patch is always a bit behind. But they’re here now and as delicious as ever. Just look at how red and juicy they are, unlike those so-called “strawberries” you find in the grocery store.

Hey folks, shop your local farmers! Eat real food!

Strawberry Festivals and More

One of my tastiest childhood memories is of a strawberry festival we attended while camping in northern Michigan. If I recall, it was a community church serving shortcake piled mile-high with strawberries and cream. Oh, so good!

Quite often such festivals are benefits for a specific cause (like these upcoming festivals here and here). Joining the celebration not only creates fun memories but also supports grassroots working together at its finest.

Food festivals have become one of the fastest growing forms of tourism and there’s a good reason why. They offer a sensory overload of the landscape, ethnicities, history, and food cultures of their given community.

Food lovers love food festivals; ask me how I know!

Which Leads Me To…

When it comes to festivals, I’m proud to help promote two Wisconsin biggies: The Soil Sisters in August and Fermentation Fest in October. These are annual celebrations that each draw thousands of people and have great social and economic impacts on their rural communities. Needless to say, a lot of organizing and marketing goes into these events.

Do you know of a festival looking to grow in its success? I’d love to help. Let’s talk about what makes a good festival and how to get the word out to all those fun-loving, destination travelers!

Earth Day and Double Duty Composting

Today, on Earth Day 2019, I’m thinking back to the roundtable discussion I was honored to lead at the MOSES Organic Conference. It was on marketing and it overflowed with interesting conversation. Today though, two particular points come to mind: composting and responsibility.

As we discussed innovative ideas to promote our farms, a woman whose name I missed (someone help me, please, I’d love to contact her) mentioned the composting campaign they’re doing for their CSA farm. They give buckets to their members and encourage them to bring food scrap compost to the farm each week where it will help to create fertile ground for next years’ crops. And I, whose marketing brain spins 24/7, suggested she be sure to put her farm name and website on the buckets.

Seriously though, isn’t a composting campaign a great idea in so many ways?

Full Circle of Sustainability

This year’s Earth Day theme is Protect Our Species and from bees to trees, good soil is vital for sustaining all of God’s creation. Composting is a small way to make a big impact on the enrichment of our soil. When we return scraps of food to the very soil from which it was taken, we complete a full circle of sustainability.

How cool is that for CSA members to participate in this full circle!

Responsibility + Ownership = Good Marketing

Marketing gurus tell us that allowing customers a sense of “ownership” is proven for building customer loyalty. We discussed this in our roundtable and how responsibility enables that sense of ownership.

The CSA farm’s composting campaign allows members to share in the responsibility of improving its soil for more nutrient-based produce. The result? These members become proud owners of the vegetables they helped to grow and they talk about them with their friends. Word of mouth marketing at its best!

What About You?

I’ve been composting for years and, gee, it’s such an easy way to put food waste to good use. Now, after touring the facilities of my newest customer, The Farmory, I’m inspired even further—maybe composting with worms?

What about you? Are you a business looking to heat up your environmental stewardship? Or a gardener wanting healthier soil? Earth Day is a great time to start composting—actually Earth Day celebrations last all week so you have time to find yourself a bucket.

So let’s get going and may the joyous rotting begin!

Want to learn more?
Soil health is a big conversation these days. Two recent and interesting articles are Compost, like the Earth Depends On It, from the Willy Street Co-op Reader and the Dirt Issue (Spring 2019) of Yes!

A Wolf Moon Welcome

Happy upcoming first full moon of the year!

Interestingly, not only will this be the Wolf Moon, it’s a Super Wolf Blood Moon. Super Moon, in that it’s closest to the earth in its elliptical orbit; Wolf Moon, because that’s the name given to January’s moon; and Blood Moon because of the reddish tint that’s going to appear when, yes, a lunar eclipse occurs. 

Barring cloudy skies, here in Wisconsin this stargazer’s phenomenon should appear this Sunday, January 20, between 10:41 and 11:12 p.m. You can bet I’ll be outside watching for it!

Back when people named moons according to the seasons, our northern ancestors hunkered themselves inside near a fire while wolves howled distantly in the January cold. Wolves are a common metaphor for hunger, yet families kept this wolf—hunger, that is—from their door with the food they’d put up earlier in autumn. 

These days, while in the cozy warmth of our homes, we’re browsing garden catalogs and dreaming of the spring months ahead when we can plant those first seedlings. The plans we make now shape the crops we grow in summer and the food we put up in fall, which in turn keeps “the wolves from our door” next winter. 

Preparedness: It’s ongoing through the seasons

For self-employed farm entrepreneurs, winter is time to plan your seed purchases. It’s also time to promote your farm and sign up members for the upcoming growing season. 

Next month is the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) Conference and I’m presenting a workshop that offers great ideas for promoting your farm. The workshop is Marketing & Branding 101 and will be Saturday, February 23, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. We’ll talk branding, because you have to brand yourself before you can market. We’ll then discuss marketing and how social media has become the easiest and most cost effective way to promote your small business. 

Hope to see you next month in La Crosse!

Where We Talk About Women and the Difficulties of Self-Promotion

My cousin JerriLynn is an amazing woman. When we were both barely into our 20s, she was an audacious entrepreneur with her own whole foods store. Since then she’s succeeded in a variety of ventures, always with moxie and always with finesse. These days she’s in real estate and even though I’m a Great Lake away from her Lansing, Michigan market, I love following her work.

I’m bragging about my cousin because just about the time Lisa Kivirist and I were taping our In Her Boots episode on the difficulties women have promoting themselves, JerriLynn’s quarterly newsletter came in the mail. I was blown away by how skillfully she announced her latest achievements, all the while keeping to her genuine and unpretentious self (and anyone who’s met JerriLynn knows this is who she truly is).

No matter what industry you’re in, tooting one’s horn is a necessary component of running your own business. It’s marketing, after all. Interestingly, many women think of self-promotion as a necessary evil. Maybe you do too? I admit I have to push myself, but I’ve also learned ways to make advocating my work easier and more authentic.

So here’s our In Her Boots, episode 60. Lisa and I share great first steps for telling your story and effectively promoting what you do. Listen up and then share your own ideas!