Garden Planting 2016

Growing up, we relied a lot on being able to produce food from our garden. Sometimes my dad would be working two or three small plots for corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and peppers. As the harvest would arrive, we would enjoy as much of it as we could, give away to neighbors and relatives, and can whatever remained. I can remember my sister and I going out to the garden after school in the spring and picking green onions and dipping them in salt as a snack. I don't think I fully appreciated back then just how unique our experience was, and how much my parents were covertly instilling in me an appreciation for the magic of where our food comes from.

Since 2007, I've had a small garden almost every year in Morgantown. Before that, as an adult away from home I would spend time planting on my tribes land with a few other folks, but there is something far more intimate about having your garden so close to home. My dad has had a garden for as long as I can remember, and even at 75, he and his brothers still plant crops together and share the produce. Our Shawnee ancestors considered the time just before planting the start of the new year and a time to embrace forgiveness and reconciliation. Maybe the work of preparing the soil for planting and looking onward to weeding and caring for crops was a reminder of just how much we need one another, and just how important our relationships are.

This year, I planted the Shawnee traditional three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) along with some tomatoes (cherry and better boys), collards, brussels sprouts, zucchini, bell peppers, and some sunflowers just for fun. I'm looking forward to sharing and feeding friends and family with some of the produce from this little truck patch. There's something especially delicious about picking a tomato, a pepper, or an ear of corn right off the plant and eating it right then and there, that people who only get their food from a grocery store really miss out on. 

Nowadays, it seems like it is a little more trendy to have a small garden, but I applaud anyone who, for whatever reason, is willing to get out and work with the soil. I believe the act of preparing and planting a garden does so much for the household or individual that attempts it. It is a profound reminder that, as much as technology is moving forward, the Creator of the universe has orchestrated it such that our food comes from the earth, and from our relationship with it. Farming or having a garden of whatever size reminds us of our role of stewardship and care, if not for the whole earth, at least for this small area near our homes. It also reminds us that we are dependent upon the rain, the sun, and good healthy soil to ensure that our plants grow, and that we have food to eat. Maintaining a garden also roots us to a deeper experience of place, and in a world that is always on the go, being rooted is a gift. 

As the summer moves forward, I look forward to watching the magic happen and the garden transform from soil, seeds, and small plants to a productive plot of magical gifts from the land. And as I think about the arrival of our child this fall with the harvest, I am hopeful to continue the tradition of teaching another generation of Shawnee about our relationship with the land and how God blesses us with food to eat. It warms my heart to think that every year, as our child celebrates another birthday, we will also be celebrating the late harvest here in these West Virginia hills. May we continue with each generation to to encourage good relationship with the land, the air, and the water. 

Review: Mountain Harvest Farm LLC (Community Supported Agriculture)

For the last three years, Jamie and I have been privileged to be able to be shareholders in a community supported agriculture (CSA) initiative with a couple of farmers who live near Morgantown. Their names are Mary and Chico and their CSA is called Mountain Harvest Farm, LLC.

I first discovered their CSA in winter 2013, when I saw a signup sheet posted in a local coffee shop, The Grind (which is a pretty fantastic place itself!). I sent an email to express interest to them and received a quick response, and began the process of investing in local agriculture.

Jamie and I have a small truck patch at the house, and we have been able to produce a decent amount of corn, beans, squash, and tomatoes from this little corner, but we had been reading and hearing a lot about community supported agriculture, and we regularly consider ways we can lower our footprint and invest in the local economy. Of course, we can always do better, but I think every one of us can benefit from taking even a small step. When we can, we strive to support local businesses, and buy food from local farmers markets. Investing in a CSA was yet another concrete step in the direction of investing locally. 

Mary and Chico, Mountain Harvest Farm's proprietors, have been renting and farming land just outside of Morgantown for a few years now. They offer their CSA members a weekly or biweekly share, and shareholders can choose between two convenient pickup locations. We chose the location across from Zen Clay Pottery Studio because it is in the middle of town and walkable from our house to pickup. The first week I went to pickup our share, I started chatting with Mary about what got her and Chico into this venture. She had been a Peace Corps worker in Honduras and that was where she had met her husband. 

Our conversation turned from local farming to international development, and she was a bit surprised at my knowledge of development. She asked what I did, and, thinking that I probably already knew just about everyone in Morgantown who knew about Nuru, I told her I worked for an international development organization. 

She asked, "Which one?" 

I responded, "Well, it's pretty new so you might not have heard of it but its called Nuru International." 

She looked at me with a grin and said, "I have a good friend who works for Nuru."

I was a bit shocked and asked "Who?" I thought I would have a really good handle on people in my part of the country who knew someone on staff. 

And then she told me that Matt Lineal, our Impact Programs Director (and previously Agriculture Strategic Advisor), had worked with her in the Peace Corps in Honduras. What a small world! And, it was the first time for me to have someone in Morgantown who knew about Nuru through a staff or board member who wasn't from West Virginia! When I told Matt about meeting Mary he was blown away by the connection, and excited that she and Chico had started the farm, and further, that Jamie and I were able to invest in this CSA with them. 

After that conversation and enjoying our first week of fresh produce from Mountain Harvest Farm, I was simply blown away by how much more our world is intimately connected than we realize. 

For the last three years--for 20 weeks a year, Jamie and I have made the short Wednesday evening walk to pick up our veggies, connect with Mary and Chico and their family, and get updates on how the weather is impacting how our crops are doing. They are wonderful people, and we are proud shareholders.

Recently, Jamie and I signed up for our fourth year as shareholders. And, if you are a Morgantown local, I wanted to encourage you to support these two West Virginia farmers by becoming shareholders too! You can sign up online by going to their website, and if you have more questions about their CSA shares you can ask them directly or just talk to Jamie or myself. You will love it!

World Food Day 2012

Today is World Food Day, which is a day dedicated toward ending global hunger. Over a billion people will go to bed hungry tonight all over the world. There are food pantries in many communities across the US that could make amazing use of your canned goods to help meet the need locally. And there are organizations who have dedicated their resources to providing relief to immediate needs caused by disasters like earthquakes and droughts. For most of the people who are reading this post, hunger is not a daily issue. The strange irony of that truth is that if you are reading this, chances are you have the capacity to help someone else who is in need.

I want to give you a few ideas that can help. First, I want to recommend that you check out a pretty extensive list of actions offered by my friends at ONE.org. They are an incredible advocacy organization and they are doing great work to advocate for improve food security in various parts of the world. One of the things that they have asked is that folks like you and me dedicate a tweet to raise awareness about global hunger, and prescribe a recipe for change. Click that link and see what you can do to help raise awareness about the issue of global hunger.

Second, I want you to consider the resources in your own pantry, and make a contribution to a food drive for your local food pantry or through your church. There are people locally who are temporarily out of work, and some non-perishable items from your kitchen via the local food pantry could go a long way to help families who are in a pinch. In northern West Virginia the largest food bank (that serving food to 47 of West Virginia's 55 counties), is the Mountaineer Food Bank.

Third, I want to encourage you to give to organizations that are helping to improve food security and meet hunger needs around the world, and of course I will give a hearty recommendation to support Nuru International's work. Over the last four years, Nuru has helped literally thousands of families to be able to feed themselves by training them in improved agricultural techniques and offering loans of high quality seed and fertilizer for use. My friend Jake wrote a blog post last summer about how Nuru's Agriculture Program was a huge difference maker for about Nuru 2000 farmers when a severe drought hit the Horn of Africa. Will you consider making a donation today to Nuru in honor of World Food Day?

Thanks so much for taking tangible steps toward fighting hunger, and helping our neighbors both around town and around the world to end hunger.

The Last Hunger Season by Roger Thurow

Earlier this summer, I was able to acquire a copy  of Roger Thurow’s new book, The Last Hunger Season. The book chronicles one year in the lives of four families who are working with an organization called One Acre Fund (OAF) to improve their livelihood as small shareholder farmers.

My initial interest in the book was because One Acre Fund is an incredible thought partner for Nuru International, and our CEO, Jake Harriman, did a summer internship with OAF in 2007 in order to learn more about their model first-hand. If you have not heard of One Acre Fund, I strongly recommend you look into their work to improve the lives of farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi.

But now for more about the book. Thurow starts off by explaining what is meant by a “hunger season” or “wanjala” in Kiswahili as this is a foreign concept to people who have never set foot outside the United States. In the West, we have access to food year round. For people in the US, it is hard to fathom that anyone on the planet would ever run out of food, or that food prices could double and triple during those times of year when there is a shortage. Even more difficult for our minds to imagine is that people grow most of their own food. While we know that farms exist, most people here buy their food in a supermarket.

Thurow does a masterful job of allowing the reader to enter into daily life for people in remote rural Kenya who are living in extreme poverty.  Unless one has witnessed it firsthand, it is hard to imagine whole communities who lack access to electricity or running water. It’s hard to imagine healthcare that is "distant and meager at best." Beyond this, Thurow helps readers get a better understanding of what access to high quality seed and fertilizer and improved planting techniques can do for these agrarian communities.

Too often, in the West we have been given distorted images of people living in extreme poverty. Too often, our global neighbors are portrayed as helpless and unable to fend for themselves. The truth of the matter is that our global neighbors are incredibly resourceful, but they have largely lacked access to tools and knowledge that could mean massive improvements to their livelihood.  Too often, these people are portrayed in a way in which we do not see their full humanity, their brilliance, or the daily choices they are compelled to make. Roger Thurow helps us to get a more accurate image of who these people are and what their dreams are, both for themselves and for their children. During each chapter, he allows us to walk through the lives of four One Acre farmers, and experience the challenges they bravely face during the course of a year. I believe that through Thurow's detailed chronicling of one year in the lives of the families of Leonida, Rasoa, Zipporah, and Francis, we have been given a true treasure. 

Through the innovative work of organizations like One Acre Fund and Nuru International, literally thousands of families are taking the first steps toward lifting themselves out of extreme poverty and dealing with chronic hunger. In the book, one gets a vivid image of the challenges that a family might face in a year, challenges like paying school fees and paying back agricultural loans. Thurow reminds us of challenges like insuring that a family has enough food to eat through the wanjala, or even challenges like dealing with health emergencies like malaria. 

Beyond his detailed description of one year in the life of four farmers, Thurow offers a primer to the history of sustainable agriculture and international development from Norman Borlaug's work in India and Pakistan in the 60s and 70s to renewal efforts being led by groups like Bread for the World, One Acre Fund, Nuru, and many others in this generation. Throughout the book, he also details the work of advocacy groups like ONE (an advocacy organization started by Bono, the lead singer of the band U2) and even the work of the Obama administration's Feed The Future initiative and agencies like USAID to bolster food security and production. He even quotes US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack's reminder that, "just one lifetime ago the United States was a country of subsistence farmers...there are no better innovators than those who farm the land." Thurow allows us to not only read about the lives of farmers, but his book is filled with opportunities to learn more about the history of sustainable agricultural development, as well as learn how others, like former representative Tony Hall and Christian writer Jim Wallis, have taken tangible action steps to speak and take action about the unnecessary injustice of chronic hunger.

I really loved the book for a number of reasons, and I believe the book is a must-read for anybody interested in sustainable agriculture as well as how our global neighbors who are suffering in extreme poverty may be able to chart a better future for themselves. If you take the time to read the stories of one year in the life of the families of Leonida, Rasoa, Zipporah, and Francis, I hope you will be able to move past the statistics you may have heard, and come to the conclusion that there is hope, and that we stand on the threshold of an amazing opportunity to work together toward helping farmers like the ones mentioned above provide a better future for their families. Thank you Roger Thurow for your engaging and inspiring work open our eyes to parts of our world from which so many in the West have been insulated.

Early Harvest

Well, it was just a few weeks ago when Jamie and I planted a variety of corn, beans, and squash, and while the summer has been incredibly dry for the most part, our squash and zuccini plants have been doing incredibly well. In fact, every day, we are producing more than we can eat in recent days. It seems that each day, we wake up to more and more produce being yielded from our little plot.

The good news is that we have been able to share this food with others. We have baked zucchini bread, cooked frittatas, and even grilled & sautéd a few variations for good measure. It is absolutely amazing to see so much come from working the land, planting, weeding, and waiting for God to do his work. It really is an amazing gift that we plant and weed, and where there were only dirt covered seeds at one time, there is now an abundance of food.

This may sound a little strange, but it has been my experience when eating food I've planted or that was planted and grown by others, it just tastes better. And here in the states, I believe that people are forgetting how to grow their own food. There is an art to preparing the land, to planting, to weeding, and to harvesting. There's a rhythm to all of it that many don't experience. I know that for me, as I left home to go to college, I didn't pay a ton of attention to the work that was being done by my parents and others to grow food, and I didn't plant anything on my own for many years.

Since I've started planting, I've been amazed at both the yield of the land, and the yield to my spirit and body. There's something about taking the time to work the land that is good and wholesome physical labor with a purpose, and there is something about the process, that reminds us that most of what happens on this earth takes time. In a world of fast food, email, and instant results, we can lose sight of that reality. It takes time to grow food. It takes time to prepare food. It takes time to work the land.

It takes time for us to grow as well. May you not become disheartened at growth that is at a slower pace than what you want, and may you see a great yield of produce from your fields and from your life.

Nuru International and Hunger In East Africa

It’s kind of hard to get our minds around a drought and what it means for people living in extreme poverty when we live in the United States. I think it’s hard because many of us have lost the connection between the weather and our food. It’s hard for us to imagine arrival at a supermarket and finding the shelves empty because food isn’t being produced. Imagine, walking through the produce section and seeing people fighting over the last small bag of potatoes, because nobody is sure when or if there will be another shipment arriving soon.

For 70% of the world’s extreme poor, they live in remote rural areas. There are no supermarkets insuring that there won’t be a shortage of food to eat. Instead, they rely on the land and work to the best of their ability to insure that their families have food to eat. And right now, there are millions in the Horn of Africa who are starving because of a drought, and because before the drought they lacked access to life-changing tools and knowledge.

Even in Kuria, Kenya where Nuru works, farmers have been affected by the drought. My friend Jake recently shared about a walk he took with a Nuru Agricultural Field Manager, James about the impact of the drought in Kuria. Nuru farmers have seen a decrease in yield of 20-30% on average, but thankfully, they still have enough food to feed their families and pay back the loan of seed and fertilizer they received at the beginning of the season. 

Other farmers did not fair so well. On the same walk, Jake and James came across a Nuru farmer’s fields and they were filled with maize that stood ten feet high.  Next to this field was a field with maize that stood 2-3 feet high and many of the plants didn’t have maize on them at all. James commented to Jake, “The drought has come again to Kenya. There will be hunger here. There will be so many this season.” James eyes grew more and more sad as he and Jake talked next to these fields.

The World Food Programme has noted that about 13 million people will be affected by drought in Somalia alone. This famine is absolutely overwhelming. It’s utterly heartbreaking, and yet, it is so difficult to imagine that in today’s world there are people who are literally starving to death.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As I mentioned before, over 10,000 people who are participating in Nuru’s agricultural programs are beginning to turn the tide.  They were trained in best practices for growing maize, took out Nuru agricultural loans, and have enough to feed their families and pay back their loans.  Programs like Nuru’s are allowing our neighbors who are living in extreme poverty to bring about lasting change through simple, scalable and sustainable ideas that can literally save lives.

Squash Blossom 2011

One of the most beautiful flowers I believe I have ever seen is the squash blossom. My ancestors thought so much of this flower that it was incorporated into clothing, footwear, jewelry, and accessories for hundreds of years. The squash blossom in its simple beauty also served as a reminder that some of the bounty of the early harvest was coming soon. It was a portent of the late harvest to come as well.

It was and is a symbol of beauty and fragility too. For the last four years, I have kept a garden at my house, and every year I write a post as I see the squash blossom open early in the morning to sunbathe it’s delicate saffron petals. I feel like skills like growing food are becoming quickly forgotten in the West. In my family, we have always grown food, and we have had a longstanding tradition of sharing our harvest with friends and neighbors, and canning some of our harvest to store for the winter months as well.

I realized that I was missing a great deal by not having a garden. I was missing an understanding of where food comes from. I was missing an awareness of what it means to labor for my food. I was missing the joy that comes at harvest time when there is food to eat and grand celebration. My family is Shawnee, and many of my tribe’s ancient ceremonies are intricately tied to planting and harvest.

This year, I have had the distinct joy of planting together with my wife. It is the first time in her life she has planted any crop. And it is exciting to watch her eyes light up as well when she sees the seeds that she planted earlier this year provide food for our new life together and food that we can share with others.

There is an unexplainable sense of gratitude I feel to the Creator of the universe that I experience uniquely when I taste and see the harvest coming. All I did was prepare the soil and drop a seed in the ground, and then amazingly that seed becomes a plant and that plant produces food. Around the world and throughout the history of humanity, I believe that farmers around the world experience that wonderful mixture of gratitude and joy that happens when they see the growth of their crop and they prepare for the harvest and celebration of food to eat for their families.

And for me and my wife this year, we look at the beautiful bouquet of squash blossoms erupting from our garden as an indicator of the harvest to come, and we are thankful.

Nuru International 2010 Annual Report: Stories Of Changed Lives

Elias Sinda's Story from Nuru International on Vimeo.

Earlier this month, Nuru released it’s annual report in a really different format. Some organizations send out a brief financial statement to donors; others send a more extensive printed annual report (Nuru did this last year). This year, we thought we would do something really different. We posted our annual report online in a really cool interactive format. I highly recommend you take some time to check it out here.

In the meantime, I thought you would enjoy watching this video of Elias Sinda and hearing about how Nuru’s work in his community has equipped him with the tools and knowledge to help his family lift itself out of extreme poverty. Elias’ story is one of hundreds being written in what is the second poorest district in all of Kenya. With Nuru’s help, the people of Kuria are turning desperate conditions into a world of opportunities. They are learning how to prevent waterborne illness. They are growing enough food to feed themselves,. They are insuring their children are enrolled in school because now they have income that will allow them to pay the nominal school fees. It’s truly wonderful to see.

In spite of the drought that has wreaked havoc across the Horn of Africa, Nuru farmers are thriving. It is truly a joy to know that lives are changing in Kuria, and that you and I get the opportunity to be part of it. Thanks for watching, and thanks for being involved. And if you haven’t gotten involved yet, now is a great time to start.

Stephen Colbert's Testimony

Approximately one week ago, the Comedy Central host of the Colbert Report, Steven Colbert, appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last week to share his "testimony" about migrant farm labor.  Known for his satire, Colbert maintained a position consistent with his character on television as he spoke to the committee.  Colbert's testimony, while attempting to bring levity to a very tragic situation, met with mixed reviews among politicians.

There are jokes all through the testimony, and many have called his statement an embarrassment.  But I have to wonder, if his "star power" didn't actually help give this issue greater attention in the media.  Maybe, just maybe, amid all of the jokes about the situation, the desire that many have for reform will gain momentum because of Colbert's statements in the committee meeting.

At one point during his statement, Colbert noted that maybe if we protect others from being exploited, we will be less likely to be exploited.  All of the joking aside, that seems like pretty sound logic.  It sounds very familiar too.  It sounds like loving our neighbor as ourselves.

I don't know if you've ever given much thought to where our food comes from if you don't grow it yourself.  I don't know if you find Colbert's statements before a government committee laudable or lamentable.  What I do know is that his testimony caused me to give greater attention to the issue, and is  yet another opportunity for me to consider how I might better love my neighbor.

How about you?