Books and Such

Hi everyone! We just wanted to update you guys with some awesome books and blogs that we are going to read as part of our senior project.

From the Farm to the Table: What All Americans Need to Know about Agriculture (Culture of the Land) by Gary Holthaus

Also, we're going to read The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball

Along with those books (and maybe a couple others we find), we'll also be using some realllly cool blogs as part of our research. Some of them are: " From London to Land Girl," "The Blog Barn," "Food politics," "Eat Local Challenge," "My Country Blog of This and That," "Farm Tales," "Half Pint Farm," and a couple other really cool ones a friend recommended to us just to name a few (so we don't bore you to death with this long list!)

As we continue working on our project, we'll keep on updating you guys with all of the cool stuff we are doing. Get excited!!!


~Kristy

Getting Down to the Nitty-Gritty!

Ok, so we probably should have prefaced our blog by saying exactly what we're doing (which is hopefully already obvious. If it isn't then we have a problem - either we are really bad writers or you're not a very careful reader!!) We should've also stated our goals, and our reasons for wanting to do what we're doing (Aka time for a boring blog post ...hopefully you're not thinking "wow, all of their blog posts are boring. who are they kidding?" but just appease us please!)


So...
Purpose: We will be working on a farm (for our senior project - a graduation requirement), something we have both always wanted to do (...more specifically ever since going to the Summer Opportunities Fair one year and seeing a Farm Camp advertised. We were dying to go. Yes, okay, we know we're weird.)
Goals: To learn more about farm life, organics, and how our food travels from the farm to our plates! 
Obstacles: Well, as clearly stated in our first blog post, finding a farm proved to be somewhat of an obstacle but now that that problem is solved, we're obstacle free! (HA In our dreams. So we'll just have to keep you updated on this because unfortunately neither of us are fortune tellers and cannot predict what may or may not happen in the future). 
Resources: Amy's Farm, hopefully a produce farm (the more types of farms we can learn about the merrier, right?), books, farmers to interview, etc.


Ok, enough for now! Hopefully the comic above made this post a little less painful?


~Jill

"Grape" News!

Ok, it's official - we found a farm to work on!!!!!!!!! YAY!!!! After many, many attempts at finding farms, we found the perfect one. It's called Amy's Farm and it promotes learning through hands on experience (which is exactly what we were looking for!) The person we talked to was very nice and told us exactly what we had to do to be able to volunteer there. So, we have to go in on a Saturday for a sort of orientation before we officially start working. After that, we can volunteer from Monday - Saturday whenever we want.

So glad that we got that sorted out!!! Can't wait to find out what we're actually going to do on the farm! Stay tuned!

Here's a link for Amy's Farm if you want to check it out:

http://www.amysfarm.com/

~Kristy

Calling All Farms!

Moooooooooooo!

Right now we are in search of a dairy farm to volunteer on for our senior project. We've looked online for hours trying to find nearby farms and of course all of the good ones are up by the California-Oregon border! There's no way we are driving 120398120893 hours just to volunteer some place, so we have no idea what we're going to do at this point...We called three different (more local!) farms today and had literally zero luck. We called up one place and told the lady we were looking for an "organic farm" to work on and she proceeded by yelling at us that she was "not an organic farm and never will be." She scowled, "I have no intention of going through all the certifications, etc that it takes to become organic," and then added that she "didn't need any help on her farm" (AWKWARD). So then we went to plan B and called another place asking to volunteer at their dairy farm (being sure not to say the word "organic" this time) and they told us "We aren't a farm. We're just a milk processing plant"(AWKARD x2). Don't they know not to have pictures of roaming cows on their website if they aren't an actual farm? (False advertising if you ask me...)

Well, here's to hoping tomorrow goes a little more smoothly. We have a few more places to contact before we will kick into desperation mode. Wish us luck! 


~Jill