Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Organic farming - the reality

Great information on the finding that organic farming is good for us and for the planet, and also good for the crops and the farmer:

....Organic farming — one way of carrying out agro-ecological farming — has been shown to increase carbon sequestration in soil relative to non-organic methods. Furthermore, extensive research, most recently by agronomist David Pimentel of Cornell, has shown that transitioning to organic and local farming could cut energy inputs into the U.S. food system by 50 percent.
"United States agriculture is driven almost entirely by these non-renewable energy sources. Each person in the country on a per capita consumption basis requires approximately 2,000 liters per year in oil equivalents to supply his/her total food, which accounts for about 19 percent of the total national energy use," Pimentel said.
In addition to cutting fossil fuel use and decreasing carbon emissions, a shift to organic farming and the resultant increases in carbon sequestration will make agriculture more resilient and more resistant to onrushing anthropogenic climate change.
Resistance and resilience are technical terms: as ecologist Alison Power observes, resistance is a system’s ability to not be affected by a “perturbation,” such as a sudden drought or hurricane. Resilience is the measure of the agricultural system’s ability to respond to a “perturbation” that does affect it—in other words, how quickly it returns to its former level of functioning, or how close to its former level of functioning it can get to.
There is strong evidence that organic-farming systems, which are usually a mix of diverse-plant communities—the furthest thing from the plains of monocultures that are the mainstay of American agriculture—are both more resistant and more resilient than other types of planting systems.

Friday, September 18, 2009

BearPaw Regional Greenways at the market

Our local land trust, BearPaw Regional Greenways, brought their wonderful maps to the market. BearPaw is a land trust with a mission to permanently conserve a network of lands that protects our region’s water, wildlife habitat, forests, and farmland. Bear-Paw works to conserve open space through outreach, education, and land protection project assistance in Candia, Deerfield, Epsom, Northwood, Nottingham, Raymond, and Strafford, New Hampshire.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Friday, September 4, 2009

Meet some more vendors














Brieghan Gardener added dried flowers to her great collection of perennials, plus apples and plums.

The little milkman also has ginger beer and other Squamscott beverages, tea, bread, pancake mix and other goodies, besides milk in real glass bottles. (Yes, I am old enough to remember them outside the door with the cream on the top.)

More music

Deanna from Deerfield and a friend provided our music this week, a great beginning to September.