Farming

Notes from the Garden: Building a house or a vegetable cage?

/ Kayleigh Levitt / 2 Comments
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Measuring the length of our new monkey-protected area in the organic farm at Cardamom County

Building a 15 meter x 20 meter vegetable cage is no small feat. The last estimate we had was that it would cost about 4 lakhs, which is apparently the cost of a small house. A lakh is a unit in the South Asian numbering system equivalent to 100,000. So, is 400,000 rupees worth it for a vegetable cage? I think spending energy to get a smarter design would be more worth it.

With the help of Raxa Collective’s head engineer, it is very likely we will be able to lower that cost significantly. As I talked about in my post about quantifying farm-to-table, I think that with a combination of lowering the cost and then taking advantage of the monkey-protected area as vigorously as possible with efficient use of the space, it will be worth it. There are elements of farm-to-table that are not quantifiable but can be seen in the overall conservation story of supporting smart land-use practices.

At the end of the day, at least the food here is locally sourced mostly from the Cumbum vegetable market in Tamil Nadu. This market is only about 25 km away and the farmers in that market are relatively close. This is far better then the way most food is sourced in the United States.

In the United States, eating local is a challenge. Most agriculture in the states is for corn and soybeans, rather than vegetables. And “local” is difficult when the local environment has few green spaces left, let alone farmland. So even though we don’t have “monkey-challenges” to growing our food locally in the states, we have monocultures and rapid suburbanization keeping us farther and farther away from fresh food.  Continue reading →

Notes from the Garden: Monsoon Season

/ Kayleigh Levitt / Leave a comment
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Burying the garden waste to prepare the land for planting

As it is monsoon season here in Kerala, we gardeners have to take into consideration the way it affects the soil. Today we did land preparation for the heavy rains. We dug holes in the new beds and took garden waste from old banana plants and buried it. The top of the soil had been mulched with manure and weeds were growing on them. We mixed the manure and weeds into the soil. I like the idea of just mixing the weeds in because then the nutrients that the weeds took from the soil can break down back into the soil again. When the heavy rains come, they would have washed the nutrients from the mulch away so this is to help with nutrient erosion. Continue reading →

Humanity’s Diet Makes A Difference, Historically As Well As Futuristically

/ Organikos / 2 Comments
On the timescale of evolutionary history, paleo enthusiasts note, agriculture is a fad. Credit Illustration by Mike Ellis.

On the timescale of evolutionary history, paleo enthusiasts note, agriculture is a fad. Credit Illustration by Mike Ellis.

Since the early days of this blog we have been hungry consumers of environmental long form journalism, of which Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker chronicles are best-in-category. They are also, frankly, almost always depressing.

Nonetheless, they put humanity into its natural context. This not-at-all-depressing chronicle demonstrates the value of that contextualization well:

The first day I put my family on a Paleolithic diet, I made my kids fried eggs and sausage for breakfast. If they were still hungry, I told them, they could help themselves to more sausage, but they were not allowed to grab a slice of bread, or toast an English muffin, or pour themselves a bowl of cereal.

Continue reading →

Notes from the Garden: A Harvest for Everyone

/ Kayleigh Levitt / 1 Comment
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Green beans at Cardamom County

When we see an abundant harvest overflowing from a wheelbarrow, maybe it’s primal, but I think there is a sense of never going hungry. There is a sense of the aliveness of freshly picked food.

Remember how we used to share our food? Remember the connection to food we had before it came from chain grocery stores? I think something in us does. Or something in us wants to remember.

By simply putting out our hand, the food passes into our possession, but it’s a different kind of possession than picking up something in a supermarket and putting it in a cart. A possession isn’t really yours, which happened without the exchange of money. I think that the natural givingness of the land makes us feel like it is not really ours and that it is for everyone, meant to be shared. When I harvest, I remember this gift. I like sharing it with other people.

 

Since I have been here as an intern, I haven’t done all that much field work. This is probably the first day I’ve been able to help just by providing extra hands. I felt like it was a way to connect with the people I am working with as language barrier has stopped us. I appreciate the togetherness that can be felt by simply harvesting something together. They are teaching me Malayalam words and using the English words they know.

Continue reading →

Notes from the Garden: Quantifying Farm-to-Table

/ Kayleigh Levitt / 7 Comments

We are in process of building a monkey-proofed area of the garden. You can see my past post to get a feel for the evolution of this idea. The main issue with providing the Cardamom County restaurant with food from the on-site organic farm is monkeys. We were inspired by these subsistence farmers in Ixopo, South Africa, who blogged about building their monkey-proof vegetable cage. They, too, are neighbors with a nature reserve, so their situation is quite similar to Cardamom County! Now, we are on our way to having a truly farm-to-table menu!

Here is the cage we are modeling ours after. Check out their blog: http://foodieschannel.blogspot.com/2011/04/this-isnt-really-recipe-but-its-about.html

Here is the cage we are modeling ours after. Check out their blog: http://foodieschannel.blogspot.com/2011/04/this-isnt-really-recipe-but-its-about.html

You may be wondering, why is there all this buzz these days about farm-to-table? There is more to it than just fresh, delicious food.

Obviously, a lot of nature gets destroyed for agricultural purposes. In the United States, so much land gets wasted on sprawling, inefficient development. In the in-between spaces, you could feed a nation. But we eat up our open, natural spaces for agriculture. Our agriculture is rarely local so it leads to problems of unnecessary carbon emissions from transport and a lot of not-fresh food in grocery stores. When we can use the land we have already developed on to provide the people there with food, why spread ourselves out so thin into nature? Continue reading →

Throwback Thursday: A Fruit Most Treasured

/ Amie Inman / Leave a comment

 

Pomegranate tree at Harvest Fresh Farm. Photo credit: Kayleigh Levitt

Pomegranate tree at Harvest Fresh Farm. Photo credit: Kayleigh Levitt

With Kayleigh stationed at Cardamom County we’re currently exploring ways to make our organic garden more productive, despite the challenges posed by local wildlife. With that goal in mind we visited a colleague’s farm in Tamil Nadu, in an area where they don’t face monkey challenges, but some of their produce requires special netting to protect against birds and bats.

While there we enjoyed a farm tour that included harvesting a few different species of pomegranate, which happens to be part of my daily menu for many years. (Frequent guests at 51 will notice the healthy and delicious seeds making an appearance in many ways.) Continue reading →

Notes from the Garden: Tropical Composting

/ Kayleigh Levitt / Leave a comment
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Soka Instructional Garden, Soka University of America. Photo credit: Leia Marasovich

Composting where I live in a sunny Southern California desert climate is very different than the composting we have done since I have been here in tropical Thekkady, India. Here are some pictures of our composting at my university garden I work at. We do ‘hot composting’ above ground. At Cardamom County they’ve been doing a type of vermicomposting, or worm composting. As a gardener, I have always considered earthworms to be a little magical. When there are worms in our garden beds, we always take it as a good omen that our soil is healthy, and healthy soil is the only path to healthy plants. They speed up the decomposition process and essentially create compost gold. They add really beneficial microorganisms to the soil and their castings, or poop, is extremely nutrient rich with the essential ingredients of good soil: nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium! Where I work in the Soka Instructional Garden (SIG), we make compost tea from the worm castings, and any time a crop is struggling, we can usually nurse it back to life within weeks of adding worm compost tea.

So here, I was happy to see, not only are the worms already dancing happily in the soil, but they have a thriving worm composting bed.There is a hole dug in the ground, maybe 6 feet deep and a good 10 feet across. They fill the hole with any garden waste, add several wheelbarrows of dirt dug up from the poultry area, which is already rich in nitrogen from their poop (therefore speeding up the decomposition process and helping the pile heat up) and then just let the worms feast. Continue reading →

Kakkoor Kalavayal

/ Salim.E.I / 4 Comments
Photo credits : Shymon

Photo credits: Shymon

Kakkoor Kalavayal is one of Kerala’s famous festivals. The village, Kakkoor, is situated in Eranakulam district. Mud racing is a post-harvest festival celebrated by the farmers of Kakkoor and surrounding villages. A farmer controls his pair of bulls as they race through paddy fields. Continue reading →

Throwback Thursday: IPM

/ Seth Inman / Leave a comment

A ladybug relative nymph in the foreground and a mature individual in the background. The tiny thing next to the nymph might be a larvae.

Yesterday, as James and I were on one of our birding walks around Xandari, we ran into José Luis, who had a couple new things to show us about the gardens and orchard that he runs. At first, it looked like a ragged young tree, its leaves half-devoured and its trunk stained black. But we quickly learned Continue reading →

Coffee in the Ground at Xandari

/ James Zainaldin / 10 Comments

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Coffee ready to be planted, next to its hole

On Monday, we began planting coffee and made great headway on getting the shrubs in the ground. Fortunately, José Luis, Xandari’s head gardener, and his team (or should we say “coffee crew” in this case?) had already done significant work in preparing the soil to receive the plants. Continue reading →

Tea Plantations – Munnar

/ Salim.E.I / 4 Comments
Photo credits : Ramesh Kidangoor

Photo credits: Ramesh Kidangoor

Munnar is a popular tourist destination in Kerala, attracting many people mesmerized by its manicured tea gardens and unique biodiversity. The region holds the largest tea plantations in India. In the nineteenth century, the British Resident of the Travancore Kingdom, John Daniel Munro, visited Munnar and had a great interest in the plantations. Continue reading →

Ocean Ownership And Caveat Emptor

/ Organikos / 2 Comments
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The U.S. has laid claim to 2.5 billion acres of coastal seas, but that vast area produces very little seafood for Americans. Therein lies a dilemma: should the U.S. cultivate giant offshore fish farms in its piece of the sea or keep taking most of the fish we eat from foreign waters?

Conservation magazine raises the following question, and goes a long way to answering it in their current issue:

NATIONS HAVE CARVED UP THE OCEAN. NOW WHAT?

…In the minds of most consumers, there is a clear dividing line between which fish are wild and which are farmed. But the truth is that this line is increasingly a blurry one.  Continue reading →

If You Happen To Be In Oxford

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As we continue menu/kitchen-testing at 51, we confront daily the question of how much meat we want to offer guests, how to source it ethically, and how to improve our vegetarian options.  This book has generated considerable food for thought, so to speak. March 27 at 4pm, during the Oxford Literary Festival, co-author of the book Farmageddon, which is reviewed here and here, will be speaking for one hour. Wish we could attend. If you can and do, please send video or notes:

39829The chief executive of Compassion in World Farming Philip Lymbery uncovers the trend towards mega-farming that he says is threatening our countryside, farms and food. He says farm animals have been disappearing from our fields as food production becomes a global industry. And the recent horsemeat scandal demonstrates that we no longer know for certain what is entering the food chain. Lymbery collaborated with Sunday Times journalist Isabel Oakesott onFarmageddon, an investigation into mega-farming that ranges from the UK to Europe, the USA, China, Argentina, Peru and Mexico. Continue reading →

A Musically Satisfied Cow Is A Productive Cow

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The Ingenues, an all-girl band and vaudeville act, serenade the cows in the University of Wisconsin, Madison's dairy barn in 1930. The show was apparently part of an experiment to see whether the soothing strains of music boosted the cows' milk production. Angus B. McVicar/Wisconsin Historical Society

The Ingenues, an all-girl band and vaudeville act, serenade the cows in the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s dairy barn in 1930. The show was apparently part of an experiment to see whether the soothing strains of music boosted the cows’ milk production. Angus B. McVicar/Wisconsin Historical Society

It is not difficult to believe, but it is funny. Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for this story about the importance of animal happiness, an idea we can all, from carnivore to vegan all everyone in between, agree is good (the video below is at least as compelling as the scientific references):

When it’s time to buckle down and focus, plenty of office workers will put on headphones to help them drown out distractions and be more productive. But can music also help dairy cows get down to business?

Some dairy farmers have long suspected that’s the case. It’s not unheard of for farmers to play relaxing jams for their herds to boost milk production, as the folks at Modern Farmer recently reported.

A tantalizing 2001 study out of the University of Leicester in the U.K. appeared to lend credence to those claims. It found that milk production went up by as much as 3 percent when cows listened to slow tunes like R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water,” rather than faster songs. Continue reading →

Cardamom Harvesting At Cardamom County

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Cardamom Harvesting

Cardamom Harvesting

At Cardamom County we believe in organically grown vegetables and spices to provide our guests with the best produce that can be used to make the most sumptuous meals. We grow organic vegetables, fruits, spices and even eggs from our own farm. These pictures show our cardamom being harvested by staff members. Continue reading →

Beauty Of Munnar Tea Plantations

/ Salim.E.I / 3 Comments
Photo credits- Ramesh Kidangoor

Photo credits: Ramesh Kidangoor

Munnar is the highest point in the Idukki district of Kerala ranging at above 4,500 feet, it is also one of the major tea producing areas of the country and has now become the headquarters for major tea producers in India. Continue reading →

Western Ghats Ecosystem Must Be Protected, But Humans Will Be Humans

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The Hindu

Local farmers in the Western Ghats, like their counterparts everywhere, generally want to be unencumbered to do what farmers do. Any given morning we wake up feeling complete solidarity with farmers. Full stop. We wake up every day looking for opportunities to support conservation where we live and work. Full stop. Currently, one such region where we work, known as the Western Ghats in southern India, is wrestling with the challenge of letting farmers be farmers while also allowing the ecosystem–one of those rare places worthy of being called a biodiversity hotspot–to continue to be the ecosystem.  Sometimes, farmers and ecosystems do not get along well. We thank the Hindu for its coverage of this issue, which is much more complicated than one article can convey:

…The sites, spread over 34 countries, “harbour the majority of the populations of more than 600 birds, amphibians, and mammals, half of which are globally threatened. Many of these irreplaceable areas are already designated as places of ‘Outstanding Universal Value’ under the UNESCO World Heritage Convention,” the report said. Continue reading →

Farm Fresh From Ghana

/ Kendra Barnett / 1 Comment
Accra Green Market Photo Courtesy of The Guardian

Accra Green Market
Photo Courtesy of The Guardian

Recently Ghana had its first ever farmer’s market in its capital of Accra, featuring locally grown, sustainable, and organic produce. This is a big step for the organic farmers in the area to expose their products to the local people. According to an article in The Guardian,

The only space we (the farmers) usually get to market our products are at the bazaars of international schools, where we sell to a lot of expats, but we need more markets like this – the best feedback we have had for our products is from Ghanaians.

Continue reading →

Farmer’s Market

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Photo credits Ramesh Kidangoor

Photo credits: Ramesh Kidangoor

India is primarily an agricultural country and agriculture plays an important role in the economy. Many times the small scale farmers and middle class customers are exploited by the middlemen. In order to eliminate this problem,  farmers have introduced a new concept called a “Farmer’s Market“. These markets offer customers fresh vegetables and fruits directly from the farmers at a reasonable price. Continue reading →

Those Fabulous Buffett Boys

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It sure sounds like a great way to pass time, giving away billions of dollars. The fact that they seem to think deeply about the implications of their wealth, as well as their methods of getting and giving, makes them even more noteworthy. Thanks to tax-payer, and listener-supported National Public Radio in the USA for bringing the other brother/son to our attention with this story:

Get Howard Buffett into the cab of a big ole’ farm tractor and he’s like a kid — albeit a 58-year-old, gray-haired one. He’s especially excited when it comes to the tractor’s elaborate GPS system, which he describes as “very cool.”

“I’m driving hands-free,” says Buffett, the son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett. Continue reading →