CSA Signup Time

Cityseed Farmers' Markets go Indoors.

If you've ever shopped at the grocery store, then you know about buying vegetables. But what if you saved a step and bought directly from the farm? The result? It's called a CSA, and many people are aware of their existence. Community Supported Agriculture has been around since the mid-1980's and it's a way for farmers to get their locally grown produce into the hands of hungry buyers.

Some CSA's will deliver; others require pickup directly at the farm. There are 13 listed farms on CT NOFA's website. Often the produce is picked only a matter of hours before it's distributed. Another way of obtaining fresh veggies is to meet at your local farmers' market and pick up from the farmer there.
Unlike a supermarket, the farm picks out the produce that is distributed, based on what's available. This makes cooking even more interesting and fun, because it requires one to take a look at the available ingredients and come up with recipes from there.

Read the full article for a complete list of CSA's in New Haven County presently listed by CTNOFA.

About New Haven Farms

About New Haven Farms from New Haven, Connecticut on Vimeo.



New Haven Farms is more than just an agricultural endeavor.



The farm works with the Yale School of Public Health to determine the effects of dietary changes on individuals who have experienced health problems. The study is based an endeavor from the National Institute of Health. Participants in the program say that their health has improved from the changes in their diet. Molly, the community liaison, works with the participants and helps collect data for the study. She rides her bike in the neighborhood and says in the short film that the farm itself is a "nice little oasis in the middle of everything."



Enter Phoenix Farm, one of New Haven Farms' sites around the city, and you'll see people fishing in the Quinnipiac River, construction on the new Q Bridge, and the only industrial-sized windmill in the downtown area, featured prominently for every car on the highway to see.



The land has been contaminated by pollutants to the point where it's no longer safe to eat food that grows in the soil. New Haven Farms sealed the soil so that it's now safe to grow on. Jacqueline, a farmer for New Haven Farms, says that 250 cubic yards of soil was placed above a semi-permeable layer to allow for crops to grow safely in the dynamically urban industrial environment where Phoenix Farm is located. The farm grows an immense amount of produce including broccoli, all types of kale, tomatoes, and much more.



You can volunteer for New Haven Farms, as Jacqueline mentions at the end of the video, simply by visiting their [website] or emailing the volunteer coordinator at info@newhavenfarms.org;



Then again, if you'd rather [donate] that's also within the realm of options to explore and also certainly worth considering.

Education for Breakfast

A bottle of milk. 

I made the switch over to soy milk, almond milk or nearly anything other than that which came from cows for my cereal indulgences in the 1990's (although still eating Honey Nut Cheerios). But today I'm going to try something different for breakfast.

Baldwin Brook Farm lists the names of its cows on the label: Bambi, Cozette, Lexi, Ginger, Lilly, Coffee, Posie, Hoppie and Ghee. They're in Canterbury, CT which is about an hour away. Baldwin Brook sells at Elm City Market on State and Chapel, as well as P&M on Orange Street in East Rock.

Reasonably priced.

At $3.89, that's not such a bad price. It covers all the grounds on which I opposed to drinking milk in the first place. It's a small grass-based raw milk dairy that is family owned and operated. It's fresh raw milk, meaning that it's not pasteurized. It contains no antibiotics. And most importantly it contains no artificial growth hormones. These, sometimes referred to as rBGH or rBST, are banned in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel and all European Union countries as of the year 2000. Growth hormone additives have been a part of the food supply since the 1970's and have arguably contributed to the antibiotics resistance problem we are now currently becoming more aware of. The growth hormone rBST can also cause health problems in cows, like mastitis, which is an infection.

In theory, using growth hormones in milk requires the use of more antibiotics on cows, to prevent the increased risk of mastitis. Supposedly there are regulations keeping these antibiotics out of the food system, but according to the CDC, we're experiencing rising rates of antibiotics resistance, which most likely has some connection to the increase of the use of the antibiotics in the animals producing our meat and dairy.

The cows in Canterbury are entirely exempt from all of this, however, because their owners have made a conscientious decision to raise their cows apart from all of the compounded complications in 21st Century agriculture. I'm also inclined to believe that the cows are also not allowed to watch television, either.

Egghead Bonus
Just to keep it dairy, there's a paper on rBST available online, by William D. Dobson, from the Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It was published in 1996 and is titled "The BST Case."

Baldwin Brook's website also has more information on raw milk, if that interests you.

Links
Baldwin Brook Farm
P&M Market in East Rock
Wikipedia article on "Bovine Somatotropin (rBST)"
CDC link to Antibiotics Resistance Statistics