Iowa Farm in Winter

Iowa Farm in Your Pocket: A Beginner's Guide, by Kirk Murray

25 Blogs Dedicated to Living Off the Land: How to Do It--from Housekeeping.org

A great article from Housekeeping.org. We'll be continuing to post more of the twenty-five articles so keep checking back!

As grocery stores continue to raise food prices, more people are turning to their own land to produce food instead of purchasing it at the store. Whether you want to grow your own herbs, harvest your own fruits or vegetables or raise cattle, there are many ways you can maximize your land as a food source. These 25 blog articles will dig into how you can live off the land.

How to Do It

There’s no way that one blog could give you all of the information that you need to live off the land, but combining these five blog entries can give you some ideas on how to go about starting the adventure.

• Live Off Your Land—Fifteen Steps You Can Take to Get Out of the Cubicle and Onto Self-Reliance
• Infographic: How Much Backyard Do You Need to Live Off the Land?
• The Floyd Eco-Village: Living Off the Land with an Economic Plan
• Tough (and Valuable) Lessons from the Homestead
• Rural Free Delivery: Living Off the Land, Almost

25 Blogs Dedicated to Living Off the Land from Housekeeping.org

25 Blogs Dedicated to Living Off the Land: Meat--from Housekeeping.org

Here's our second installment of "25 Blogs Dedicated to Living Off the Land!" Today, we're looking at how to find meat. Make sure to check out the featured article from Cedar Rapids's The Gazette.

Hunting isn’t the only way to have meat on your dinner table if you are living off the land. Many folks choose to raise their own livestock to butcher for food. A family of four can eat for several different meals from the meat that comes from a whole pig or cow. If you live by water, you can add fish or other seafood to your diet. These five blog posts will share some of their insights with you.

• Living Off the Land
• The Year in Oysters
• Living Off the Land
• Abandon the Office: Be a Hunter-Gatherer
• Living Off the Land—and Sea—in Kotzebue

25 Blogs Dedicated to Living Off the Land from Housekeeping.org

Practical Farmers of Iowa, Part 3

Interview with Luke Gran, Practical Farmers of Iowa, Part 3

Founded in 1985, Practical Farmers of Iowa includes a diverse group of 2,000 farmers and friends of farmers. The organization’s mission is to advance profitable, ecologically sound, and community-enhancing approaches to agriculture through farmer-led investigation and information sharing. Below is part 3 of acquisitions editor Catherine Cocks’s interview with Luke Gran, the coordinator of PFI’s Next Generation program. The first two posts appeared on June 12 and June 19.

Catherine: Who are the people who want to become farmers today?

Luke: Many are the children of farmers, but a growing number are people with no family background in farming. In terms of age (again drawing on that March 2012 survey), about 30 percent are between 19 and 28, another 30 percent are between 29 and 38, about 16 percent are between 39 and 48, and about 15 percent are between 49 and 58, with the remainder older than that. It’s about 50-50 men and women, although in 2012 only 40 percent of the beginning farmers who responded to the survey were female. They bring all levels of skill and experience to farming, and many still have off-farm jobs. Some are immigrants or refugees from other countries, such as Sudan. They are looking for advice on adapting to the Iowa climate and gaining access to markets.

Catherine: What are two or three things ordinary consumers (who are not farmers or planning to become farmers) can do to help establish a new generation of farmers?

Luke: Landowners are instrumental in determining who gets access to land and how it’s farmed. In some parts of Iowa (such as many of the counties in the northwestern part of the state), 75 percent of the farmland is owned by nonresidents, people who don’t live in the county. If you own a farm but are not farming it yourself, take a look at who your tenant is and ask about his or her plans for the next generation. Think about ways you or your tenant could help a beginning farmer get started.

If you don’t own land, you can still help by buying products from beginning farmers—meat, eggs, vegetables, small grains, flowers, you name it—at farmers’ markets and cooperative grocery stores. Spend your food dollar locally; talk to the managers at your favorite restaurants, cooperatives, or grocery stores. Ask for locally grown foods and ask about the farmers who are producing them.

            You can also work with producer cooperatives to buy directly from farmers, or become a member of a CSA (a community-supported agriculture association).

            Another way you can help is by joining PFI—25 percent of our members are “friends of farmers,” not farmers—they are people who support farmers learning from each other.

Catherine: Where can people learn more about farm succession and how to get started in farming?

 Luke: The PFI website (www.practicalfarmers.org) is a good resource. Folks who want to see full details about our beginning farmer network should check out: http://practicalfarmers.org/blog/2012/pfi-beginning-farmer-annual-survey-results.

Also, through PFI or local organizations you can find other farmers and develop a network, whether you’re a new farmer or an established one. Attending PFI events is a good way to build connections.

Some good books include Atina Diffley’s Turn Here Sweet Corn (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). This is a memoir of establishing organic vegetable farm near Twin Cities over the past thirty years.

I also recommend Wes Jackson’s Consulting the Genius of the Place (Counterpoint, 2011). This is a book of philosophy as well a memoir of Jackson’s life and ideas and his vision for the future of agriculture.

If you want to know more about PFI, you might take a look at Michael Bell’s Farming for Us All (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).







More information: Farming's New Faces

Excerpt from Esther's Town

Lewis Paulson would long remember the miserable journey he made as postman in February 1861 when during a raging blizzard it took him five days to make the forty-five mile trip from Estherville to Algona. The public rewarded him with a $9 contribution for the trip he made on snowshoes. At one point he was temporarily blinded by the snow, lost his way, and wandered in virtually a circle for one whole night. He didn't stop to rest for fear of freezing to death. Stumbling accidentally near a cabin when he thought he heard someone calling hogs, he found hospitality that saved his life.

Esther's Town, by Deemer Lee

Practical Farmers of Iowa, Part 2

Interview with Luke Gran, Practical Farmers of Iowa, Part 2

Founded in 1985, Practical Farmers of Iowa includes a diverse group of 2,000 farmers and friends of farmers. The organization’s mission is to advance profitable, ecologically sound, and community-enhancing approaches to agriculture through farmer-led investigation and information sharing. Below is part 2 of acquisitions editor Catherine Cocks’s interview with Luke Gran, the coordinator of PFI’s Next Generation program. In our first post on this interview (June 12), Luke Gran said that marketing and production are the two biggest challenges facing new farmers.

Catherine: What are the marketing challenges?

Luke: Folks in the PFI beginning farmer network grow diverse crops and target diverse markets, from farmers’ markets to community-supported agriculture to grocers to brokers on the Chicago Board of Trade. All of them want to know how to build or maintain their customer base or how to make prudent selling decisions in commodity markets.

Catherine: And the production challenges?

Luke: In terms of production, 33 percent of our beginning farmers are focused on horticulture, but the knowledge of how to produce highly productive, diverse vegetable crops of high quality is lacking in Iowa because of the dominance of investments in research and market infrastructure for corn and soybeans over the past several decades. So this is knowledge that farmers are reacquiring now through experience and networking with other farmers. Another 20 percent of our beginning farmers are growing grain and raising livestock in integrated farm systems, and 15 percent of them are grazing livestock on grass-based systems. The knowledge of these systems also has also been lost as markets shifted and support in Iowa for these practices dwindled over the past half century.

            In general, new farmers face challenges in getting access to capital and land, developing comprehensive business plans, and finding or building adequate infrastructure for livestock and processing. 

More information: Farming's New Faces

Practical Farmers of Iowa, Part 1

Interview with Luke Gran, Practical Farmers of Iowa, Part 1

Founded in 1985, Practical Farmers of Iowa includes a diverse group of 2,000 farmers and friends of farmers. The organization’s mission is to advance profitable, ecologically sound, and community-enhancing approaches to agriculture through farmer-led investigation and information sharing. Below is acquisitions editor Catherine Cocks’s interview with Luke Gran, the coordinator of PFI’s Next Generation program.

Catherine: Can you briefly describe the Next Generation program and tell me why it’s needed?

Luke: The Next Generation program was developed in response to PFI members’ requests for more support in dealing with their children’s wish to come home and farm with them. Farmers wanted to share with each other their struggles and successes in making this happen. Established with seventy-five beginning farmers in our membership, it has now grown to include 1,300 beginning farmers in Iowa and continues to grow each month by about thirty beginners. Now the majority of people involved in the program tell us they are not the children of farmers. They’re new farmers without that rich family background and experience to draw from who are looking to network with other farmers.
        Keep in mind, if there’s no place for beginning farmers, if we don’t support and encourage them to explore their diverse farm business dreams, we will have a stark rural landscape, without a lot of humans in it—just a limited number of families with the large equipment that is necessary to support the production of corn or soybeans. Add in clusters of animal confinement complexes from county to county. So much of Iowa’s cultural identity depends on us creating space for families to continue farming, and this means ensuring the generational transition and conveying knowledge. Even if you don’t farm, think about your favorite recipes or meals or season—our food is very intimately tied to humans on the land, living with natural cycles. Farmers are key part of that. So think about what we could lose if there is no new generation of farmers.

Catherine: What are the top three obstacles to getting started as a farmer?

Luke: The most recent information we have is from a March 2012 survey. As of last year, beginning farmers listed marketing as their top challenge, followed by production issues, financing (access to capital), pricing farm products, and financial recordkeeping.

More Information: Farming's New Faces

Interview with Jenny Barker Devine: Part 2

Jenny Barker Devine, author of On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farm Women’s Activism since 1945, is an assistant professor of history at Illinois College.

4. Do you think women in farming today work in different circumstances than their mothers and grandmothers, or are there important continuities?

The most notable differences are in the technology and work options available to women. But even with all of these changes, women’s intense commitments to their families and to their land have remained the same. Over the decades, women’s primary concerns have been about building successful operations that can be handed down through the generations. In the past, policymakers have written this off as sentiment, but what women are really demanding is sustainability. One wonders what our current agricultural economy would look like if policymakers had listened to women decades ago.

5. Of all the individual stories you tell about women activists in the book, which one is your favorite?

All of the individual stories have some personal significance for me, but my favorites come from the oral histories by members of the National Farm Organization (NFO). Those women laid bare the triumphs and struggles of their lives and I am so grateful for their honesty. I often think of Luella Zmolek talking about how “it was a very sad day when the last cows went out of the yard.” All of her hopes and dreams were placed in those cows, and she gave them up for the NFO. It not only shows the depth of her commitment and the strength she possessed to see her ideals through, but I think we can all relate to those moments when life just isn’t what we thought it might be. 

Interview with Jenny Barker Devine: Part 1

Jenny Barker Devine, author of On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farm Women’s Activism since 1945, is an assistant professor of history at Illinois College.

1. How did you get interested in farm women’s political activism?

Looking back, it was a pretty unlikely topic for me. I actually grew up in town and my last relatives to live on farms were my great-grandmothers—both of whom left in the 1920s. My first exposure to the topic was as a college senior, when I interviewed ten farm women about their experiences during the Second World War. Those women, with a really strong self-identification as workers, inspired me to entirely rethink what I had learned about feminism in women’s history courses. They were more interesting to me than urban wage-earning women because on a farm you negotiate work roles and economic resources with a husband or other family members, rather than a boss. The social and family dynamics involved are still incredibly fascinating to me.

2. Why focus on the decades after 1945?

When I first started this research, there was a wonderful literature on activism before 1945 as well as activism during the farm crisis of the 1980s. I was curious to know what happened between those years. Scholars of the farm crisis asserted that women’s activism was something new, but I had this hunch that it was actually quite old. I wanted to know what happened as the dramatic changes related to mechanization were actually unfolding, and how those changes affected farm women and their perceptions of appropriate roles on the farm.

3. You argue that the Iowa farm women who participated in the Farm Bureau, the Farmers Union, the National Farm Organization, and the Porkettes in the 1950s and 1960s were feminists, even though they probably wouldn’t have called themselves that. Why do you think this is so?

In my line of work, as an academic who studies and teaches about gender issues, saying “I am a feminist” is an asset that enhances my credibility in scholarly circles. But this is not true everywhere, and even in 2013 identifying as a feminist carries certain risks. Depending on the crowd, you risk being ostracized as a disruptive, anti-male, anti-family radical. For women working to better conditions in the countryside, feminism wasn’t the primary issue. They saw improving women’s lives as one part of a much larger whole, so they drew from and developed feminist strategies, but standing up and publicly proclaiming one’s feminism was not a priority. This is not to say the women in these organizations wanted to identify but were too fearful. It simply wasn’t rhetorically necessary for them or their success as a group.