The Green Room

Allison Scott and her brother Matthew Scott and their neighbor Emma Schafer, right, of
Springfield, Ill., explore the grounds at the Vincent Family Farm in Rochester, Ill. The
kids and families receive local produce from the farm 25 weeks out of the year in the
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program.

(Shannon Kirshner/The State Journal-Register/AP)

Sample locally grown produce and support farmers in your community by participating in
a CSA program.

By Theresa Grimaldi Olsen

SPRINGFIELD, Ill.

Allison and Matthew Scott like to tell their extended family in the Chicago area that they have a farm in Springfield.

“They must have told them a half dozen times,” Noel Scott says of her 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. The farm is where they bite into a raw onion and eat it like an apple, pick snap peas off the vine and mulberries off the bush for an immediate snack.

The reality is they don’t own or live on a farm. They live in the city of Springfield at Park and Fayette near Washington Park. But this summer, they worked and played at “the farm.”

The farm is the Vincent Family Farm located east of Rochester where the Scotts share the responsibility for the organic vegetables that are grown there as part of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).

In a CSA, a group of people pay a farmer before the growing season and, in return, share the harvest. Consumers purchase a share or a half share and receive a box or a bag of seasonal produce each week throughout the growing season. At some farms, there also is an opportunity to learn to harvest and weed.

At the Vincent farm, Todd Vincent leases land to two vegetable farmers. The partners (Vincent, Andy Heck and Garrick Veenstra) grow between 40 and 50 different types of vegetables for about 50 families who bought shares in the spring. The families go to the farm each week to pick up their box of vegetables or to a drop-off point in Decatur.

The pay-ahead agreement creates an opportunity for consumers to share the burden of the planting costs and the fluctuations in the harvest that is so dependent on weather and other variables.

“It’s a community really,” farmer Heck said. The farmers want to make the shareholders feel like they are part of the operation and welcome the families to help in the harvest, although that is not a requirement of the membership.

Lindsay Record, executive director of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance based in Springfield, said CSAs are a growing trend throughout the country that has just begun in this area.

“For some reason, there aren’t as many in this town,” Record said. “There’s definitely a demand for it.”

Heck said he has a long waiting list. There are two CSAs in the Springfield area that sell vegetables as well as eggs and chickens — the Vincent Family Farm and Lazy T Farm in Dawson. The CSA concept is new this year to both farms and are closed for the season. The waiting list is for the 2010 growing season.

Jubilee Farm in New Berlin offered a CSA in 2008, but took a break this year to allow a new farmer to get established, Sister Sharon Zayac said. She is taking names for a CSA that will begin next spring.

Record said it is worth getting on the waiting list. Even better, tell another farmer to consider the CSA concept, she said. It is a great way to sample locally grown produce, she added.

Scott said the challenge is to try new vegetables. Customers don’t know what vegetables and herbs will be in the basket until pick-up. The harvest depends on the season, the weather and the growing conditions.

“It’s great if you don’t mind trying new things,” Scott said, adding that it is a challenge to be prepared to investigate and try new recipes.

Last year, Scott said she felt like she was inundated with kale. She was forced to learn how to cook with it, though. Now, her family enjoys kale, a leafy green similar to spinach, stir-fried with garlic and olive oil and paired with cheese ravioli.

The CSAs all provide recipes. Veenstra gives customers recipes in an e-mail newsletter that his mother creates.

Editor’s note: For more on gardening, see the Monitor’s main gardening page, which offers articles on many gardening topics. Also, check out our blog archive and our RSS feed. You may want to visit Gardening With the Monitor on Flickr. Take part in the discussions and get answers to your gardening questions. If you join the group (it’s free), you can upload your garden photos and enter our next contest. We’ll be looking for photographs of fruits. So find your best shots of summer’s blueberries, peaches, plums, etc., and get out your camera to take some stunning shots of early fall apples. Post them before Sept. 30, 2009, and you could be the next winner.

Nocola Tesla was a scientist specializing in Direct Current (DC) derived from machinery that derived its power from Electromagnetic sources.  The goal was to put out more energy than was put into the machine in a ratio that made it feasible to use the machine for social energy delivery.  Tesla achieved this with numerous machines, all of which have disappeared along with their blueprints care of the US Patent Office and various corporate interests who have bought them and put them away from the mainstream understanding.  Tesla’s machines produced significantly more energy than they used to produce the energy and used a source that was non polluting, limitless and readily available in the magnetic field of the Earth itself.  He was a preimminent scientist in his day as well as a recognized genius.  He was not, however, a member of the corporate elite and was also not, in any sense of the word, an effective marketing mind.  Tesla wanted to give the energy away because he felt that every human being had a right to the energy that the Earth produced like rain and that because of this no one person owned it.

Thomas Edison was a scientist specializing in Direct Current (DC) derived from machinery that derived its energy from fossil fuels.  The goal was to produce more energy than was put into it in order to use the machine for social energy delivery.  Edison achieved this with numerous machines, all of which were presented to the best corporate minds of the day and with certain marketing modifications, such as the transformation of Direct Current (DC) into Alternating Current (AC) which could be set at various frequencies to be able to power various kinds of appliances which could be back end sold to the energy users, was able to parlay his form of energy into the industrial complex that existed in his day.  Edison’s machines produced significantly more energy than they used to produce the energy and use a source that was heavily polluting, limited and conditionally available in the crust of the Earth.  He was a preimminent scientist of his day, a contemporary of Tesla and was a recognized genius.  He was an astute business man as well with an eye on personal wealth rather than the abundance of all individuals.

The discoveries of these two men delineated the two paths that the world could have gone on to achieve the technological society that we live in today.  These two discoveries were the decision that humanity was presented with.  One decision was limitless, clean electromagnetism and free energy for all or limited, dirty fossil fuel and rationed energy for all.  The corporate strangle hold on the political system was as strong in those days as it is now, eventhough perhaps not so complex and entrenched.  For this reason, the decision to charge for electricity and enter it into the market instead of making it a fundamental right of all human beings was the course decided upon by the corporate elite who control the political process and consequently what happens to all the Earth’s inhabitants.

There is much talk about solutions to the problem, but all of them center on the upkeep of the for profit model that excludes the everyday citizen from participating in the abundance of technology and resources, until today…

I have stumbled upon something that everyone should read about.  It is humanity’s last best hope to regain what was lost and save itself from the precipice that it is about to go over in the name of the will of the rediculously small in number greed mongers who control literally EVERYTHING.  Check out The Orion Project and get involved!  Pass it on to all your friends and everyone you know well or even slightly.  Heck pass it on to mailing lists of people you don’t know.  Do whatever you can to make this an issue.  The Orion Project has an activist arm that helps you do just that.

At the end of the day, more light is being shed every day on the nature of the way our world is run.  Every day this light is showing us that resources concentrated in the hands of just a few is tantamount to a death sentence for the human race or a number of the human race that exceed the limits of such a control based system.  Eventually humanity is going to be faced with the stark contrast between the abundance and sustainability of a participatory ownership model and the scarcity and unsustainability of a control based greed model.

What do YOU choose?  Read the facts.  Study history.  Look it up.  Google Tesla Vs. Edison.  In the end you are looking at the Global Corporate square in the eyes and you are also seeing your reflection in them.  Every day we make decisions to use the ease and convenience of the corporate slave drug.  It lulls us into a sense of well being and survival when it should be setting off every survivalist alarm that nature has provided us with over countless eons of time.  We must rediscover the need for personal sustainability within the auspices of the social framework that we all live in from microbes to humans and beyond.

Get a good dose of The Orion Project today.

Submitted by Benjamin Alexander De Mers

Benjamin is the CEO of I Am Marketing and Media Services, a global provider of marketing and media services.  Benjamin also publishes around the web for various ezines, newsletter and blogs on a variety of subjects from Internet neutrality to alternative energy.

Every so often I stumble upon something effective and enlightening while endlessly looking for more resources to expand the awareness of Earth Friendly Citizens of our Big Blue Marble hanging in space.  This week I think I have found a real gem, one that speaks to the economic troubles of our times as well as the ethical decay that is prevalent in them.  This message resonates in a practical, activist way with what John McConnell envisioned in his idea of justice and its consequences upon Earth’s resources.  The ideas this non-profit organization works tirelessly to promote are some of the best and dignified responses to the world’s most pressing economic problems that I have ever encountered.

In the words of Norman Kurland, President of CESJ, “On the one hand there is capitalism, an economic system governed by market forces but where economic power is concentrated in the hands of a few who own or control productive capital. On the other hand, socialism, in its many forms, is an economic system governed centrally by a political elite, with even more highly concentrated ownership and economic power. Logically, a ‘third way’ would be a free-market system that economically empowers all individuals and families through direct and effective ownership of the means of production–the best check against the potential for corruption and abuse.”  I invite you to check out this wonderful human adventure that is going on at The Center for Economic and Social Justice.

Submitted by Benjamin Alexander De Mers

Benjamin is the CEO of I Am Marketing and Media Services, a global provider of marketing and media services.  Benjamin also publishes around the web for various ezines, newsletter and blogs on a variety of subjects from Internet neutrality to alternative energy.

If someone was to walk up to you on the street and tell you that enough oil to power the world could be harvested from a single celled organism grown in the back yards of every citizen on this planet would you believe them?

Most of us would literally laugh that person off the planet.  The owners of OriginOil are not laughing one bit.  In fact they are taking this quite seriously.  Not only do they believe that it can be done but they have taken things a step further and invented a process whereby this oil can be extracted at a super high speed rate which will make it more than competitive with fossil fuels.

Don’t take my word for it.  Click the link listed above and check out their website.  You can also access a really great Wiki article by clicking here. 

Submitted by Benjamin Alexander De Mers

Benjamin is the CEO of I Am Marketing and Media Services, a global provider of marketing and media services.  Benjamin also publishes around the web for various ezines, newsletter and blogs on a variety of subjects from internet neutrality to alternative energy.