Looking for our social network for farmers and people who love fresh food? Start with our homepage. The Farmfoody.org blog is where announcements and other material related to the site is posted.
It appears that since we upgraded to a new version of user management package the forgotten password tool may not have been working. After refreshing files on the server it appears to be working fine. I went through a complete password reset and change cycle. So if you were trying to reset your password and it was refusing to recognize your email address, please try again.
Steve Knoblock
Ian Walthew was a big fan of farmers’ blogs, but became frustrated at spending too much time trying to find good ones and then forgetting to bookmark them, so he started a blog to keep track of them. The site is farmblogs.blogspot.com
I encourage farmfoody.org members to recommend their favorite farm blogs and bloggers to Ian so he can include them in his site. Just go to his website and contact him.
The Washington Post recently published an article about buying a whole steer I Can’t Believe I Bought the Whole Thing direct from the farm. One of confusing thing for consumers is how freezer beef like this is priced and how to compare it with store prices.
The “hanging” or pre-cut weight is the weight of the fresh carcass after slaughter. The head, hooves, guts, and hide have been removed and the carcass is split down the backbone into two sides. Most farms that sell quarters, sides, or whole beefs, sell based on this hanging or pre cut weight, because it is an easier figure for them to calculate from.
The “cut” weight is the weight after the hanging carcass has dry aged and been trimmed of bone and fat, and has been packaged and frozen. “Cut” weight is the weigh of the beef the consumer takes home.
Typically a hanging carcass loses between 5% of its weight during dry aging (it dehydrates) and and another 20% to 25% when the bones and fat are removed. So for example, a farm selling a 250 pound side of beef at $4.50 a pound for a pre-cut or hanging carcass would cost about $1125. The beef you would take home would actually only be 191 pounds (250 less 25%) So you beef would cost $5.89 per pound for the cut weight. This is the price to compare with store prices.
If you need help knowing what to do with your mass quantities of beef, look to Fergus Henderson’s books on “nose to tail eating.” A good start is the American edition The Whole Beast.
I believe the contaminated tomato debacle unfolding over the last week has something to tell us about the factory food system, which supplies much of what we eat. It is fascinating how this came to be embodied in the shape of our tomatoes. A lot of people are asking the question, just what kind of tomatoes are safe to eat? One answer, we are told by news and government, is to suspect our round tomato friends of harboring salmonella. I had to stop and ask why is this? Why round tomatoes?
Although the description has caused confusion, my first thought was that by “round red tomato” they were talking about the class of nondescript tomato one finds commonly in the supermarket produce section, piled high in a bin. Typically, these are large, as nearly perfectly spherical as the tomato board can blandish producers into making them, bland looking orbs sold in the supermarkets and funneled by the ton into the fast food system to be slapped onto burgers. They are the perfect food to fit the machine.
A second later, it occurred to me that if I were to go to my local farmer’s market or farm stand looking for tomatoes and I found some decidedly out-of-round, oddly shaped heirloom tomatoes, that I could very likely be assured they were uncontaminated. They are too imperfect, too delicate for the factory food system, and very likely grown on a local farm or garden. Their shape was a key to identifying their probable origin in a distributed, local food system. By the shape of the tomato I could judge its origin and quality, since I knew that no sane commodity grower would grow such a tomato, unfit for the fast food joint, unfit for the average consumer (who has lost contact with farm and garden, with whole food) frightened by a few blemishes, odd colors or funky shapes.
I can’t promise you won’t get sick from locally grown tomatoes. The independent farm system creates something big agriculture lacks: firebreaks. The decentralized nature of independent farms and their localized customer base create firewalls capable of containing an outbreak. The factory food system grows enormous numbers of a single crop and distributes the harvest through a sprawling food processing system, which spreads and amplifies even a small outbreak in one field across the nation, into all sorts of processed foods, just as happened with contaminated lettuce. It is the nature of the system, which has only dominated for a handful of decades, that has changed our relation to food and presented this problem of “wildfires.”
Although an individual tomato patch might become contaminated, the effects would be isolated to the one farm or local area. There is far less chance of cross contamination on the way to market. The farm down, in the other state, the road is unlikely to suffer the same contamination. A farm depends on its reputation. Any taint or question about its food and the farm will be devastated. Independent farms rely on their reputation to bring return business, unlike big agriculture.
Perhaps it is fitting the warning comes in the form of these alien orbs, signaling with their perfect roundness and flashing reds, the revenge of the round red tomatoes. Although at first glance, the oddly shaped heirloom at the farm stand might seem more alien, those are the fruits that piqued my curiosity when as a child my parents took me to visit farm stands. They were outstanding in the multi-lobed beauty, looking ready to burst. They were bursting with flavor, at least when we got them home and started the barbecue.
I thought this comment was particularly applicable to farmfoody.org as describing the conversation between farms and their customers we aim to foster:
“Shopping locally carries with it no guarantees that all food will be free from harmful bacteria. It does, however, afford you an opportunity to look the farmer who grew your food straight in the eye. You can see the pride of growing a healthful, safe product there. Also, there is less environmental impact because the food doesn’t have to be shipped so far. Finally, it tastes better, especially the tomatoes.”
(Comment to Washington Post article by Patti Reis | June 9, 2008)
We are featuring farms who we think have done a good job with their profile on farmfoody.org A good profile has a good description, a relevant set of tags, is using bulletins to communicate with their customers, are taking advantage of frequently asked questions and have added recipes.
That’s the key to using the site — getting foodys in your area to join and become a friend of your farm. Once a friend is established, you have an open line of communication to customers eager to hear about your products.
Quail Cove Farms
A family owned and operated organic farm and natural foods warehouse located on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. We grow organic sweet potatoes, organic peanuts, organic butternut squash and organic summer vegetables. Visit their farmfoody.org profile.
Homestead Farm
Located in Poolesville, Maryland, opens in late May when the strawberries are ripe and ready to be picked. We offer both Pick-Your-Own and already picked. The summer season brings thornless blackberries, peaches and a variety of summer vegetables including vine ripened tomatoes and sweet corn picked fresh every day. Visit their farmfoody.org profile.
This will be a brief update of some bugfixes. More on the larger changes later.
We now filter recipe and FAQ text for these word processor characters. You should not see any recipes or FAQ items not save their text.
* Note: Filtering is not applied to the title, so please avoid copying and pasting word processor text into a title.
Also, it was discovered pagination was not active on the recipe and FAQ listings, so they were only displaying the first ten. This is fixed, although the pagination is misbehaving a bit, which we are looking into. Update: fixed.
We were featured in the Virginia Farm Bureau News in the Washington Post and in the upcoming issue of Piedmont Virginian magazine.
It’s been a busy time at farmfoody.org and we have been adding new features and updating the website. Our membership is growing. We thank all of the people who have joined our site in recent months. I hope to have an update soon here on the blog.
We had some technical issues yesterday, but things should be settled down for now.
Our contact form was down for a few minutes this afternoon, so if you submitted a message about 12:30pm Eastern, you might want to send it again if you haven’t heard from us.
On the 18th, we had a large spike in traffic causing our database server to be unable to keep up. We discovered some issues with the code and made some change. Also, we took some measures to reduce load on the servers that caused some other problems for reasons we are still exploring.
For reasons too long to go into here, our IP address changed last night. It seemed to propagate quickly, so by morning most people should be seeing our site. If you were logged in prior to the change, your session should have expired by now, so you should not have any problems, but if you do, you may want to clear your cookies and cache if you have problems access the site or logging in. I am still seeing some odd behavior with the login. It is working, but the messages may seem strange. Just click My Account and it should force a login.
We apologize for any disruption.
Steve Knoblock
We are steadily making changes to the site, as you may have noticed. One important change is we have decided, after some thought about the idea of bringing together ‘producers’ and ‘consumers,’ to return to just two account types, Farm (producer) and Foody (consumer), as we had originally envisioned.
If you had a ‘chef’ or ‘gardener’ account with us, you are not forgotten. We will be thinking in the coming months how to incorporate your unique requirements into our site. We recognize the contributions of chefs and gardeners to the farm food community. For now, chefs and gardeners can mark their accounts as special using tags. A chef can enter ‘chef’ as a tag and gardeners can enter ‘gardener’ as a tag. Although, your account type will appear in the listing as Foody, people can find you by searching for the tag.
There will be some fields associated with a chef or gardener account that will become inaccessible. We hope this is a minor inconvience, since the function of these fields can be taken up in a broader context by tags. Tags allow any of our users to match up based on their interests or products without the need for special “interests” fields. Just enter your interests or produce into the tags field. Look for improvements in tagging to come.
Please accept our apology for any inconvenience this change has caused.
We also have rolled out a tweaked version of our site design, which we hope conveys a stronger visual message of farm foods.