Adirondack Erratic

How do our food choices affect climate change, land use, local economies, world trade? A movement is emerging to connect people more directly with the foods they buy, an ethic that looks at the hidden costs of our current food system. (A similar discussion about the hidden costs of our material culture has yet to reach mass consciousness , but that’s another topic.) Two recent articles add to the accumulating wisdom that says buy whole foods, buy local, go organic, and cut down on meat.

Last fall, Cornell researchers compared the amount of land needed to maintain various diets based on New York agriculture.

“A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food,” said Christian Peters, M.S. ‘02, Ph.D. ‘07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. “A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres.”

Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use.

According to the findings, supplementing a mostly plant based diet with small amounts of meat uses less prime agricultural land, because animals can be pastured on more marginal acreage. For more info, read here.

The second article comes from the North Country Kitchen column in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise by Yvona Fast who maintains a website at wordsaremyworld.com. This article, written for Earth Day sums up a commonsense approach to eating “green.” As she says,

By reducing waste, recycling, using fewer resources, and buying locally raised, pastured meat and organically grown vegetables at farmer’s markets, you can honor the earth’s bounty and sustain natural resources. Waste less food, produce less greenhouse gas, and consider how your food choices affect the rest of the world.

You can read the rest of her article here.

Beautiful weather means everyone is on the move - including this woodpecker beating my alarm clock lately (the hose sprayer does seem to cool him off.) And it means an influx of hungry deer.

It took a surprisingly short time to get the electric fence going again this summer. In order to condition the deer to the fence I’ve put bait on bits of foil all around the perimeter. The idea is for the deer to touch a tender part (their noses) to the fence, getting an instructive shock. We will see; last year they blithely walked through the fence to reach the goodies in the garden.

My charger setup is on the left; the picture on the right shows the baited foil, with garlic sprouting in the background.

And here’s a shot of the forsythia, just because it’s so lovely.

Sunday was one of the best days skiing at Whiteface - soft snow, crazy spirits, beautiful views. I returned home to see bare ground peeking out from the snow edges, enticing me to pull my first weeds. The growing season begins!

Last week I stoked my enthusiasm for expanding my gardens by attending a workshop on high tunnel growing in Saranac Lake, sponsored by the Cornell Cooperative Extension.
Various presenters, including farmers and researchers, talked about the pros and cons of growing under plastic (mostly the pros) and showed a number of different types of structures that could be used. Investment costs range from over $10,000 to grow raspberries to a few hundred dollars for low tunnels, such as the ones built by Eliot Coleman as a demonstration for the Common Ground Fair in Maine.

(to be continued…)