Farmer Pete

I really enjoyed the visit to Ambrose Farms last Friday. Farmer Pete was an extremely nice guy, who is passionate about local produce and has very good intentions. It was very nice to try fresh crops as we were strolling the farm. He grows everything from strawberries and asparagus to eggplant and olive trees (which takes about 7 years to grow!) It was very interesting seeing all the different methods that Farmer Pete used, and he even shared some of his little tricks, for example he doesn’t use biodegradable plastic because the very bottom doesn’t degrade so you still end up having to pull it up! (Suggested invention…) It was a great closing to Urban Agriculture as we saw everything we talk about in class and read in Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle come together.

Farmer Pete had great ideas about ways to be more resourceful. For example he wanted to put a pipe through his mulch pit to energize his green house! One of the main problems he saw was the lack of connection between local farms and the community. Although CSA does great things, he felt that even a simple sign could help connect the two. Essentially, there should be a better middleman between the farmer and the consumer. How do we improve community outreach? With frontline activism, local food can move more into grocery stores and citizens have more options to buy local produce. I feel that many people would buy local but do not know where to find it. Like Tavner mentioned, we really are so lucky to have so many local farms surrounding us and we should really take advantage of that. Local foods should be sold more at the grocery stores, and may be eventually the infrastructure of the global food trade can be recentralized.