The Godmother of Goat Cheese

Today my post is a link to an article in On Wisconsin that I wrote this spring about Anne Topham, the godmother of goat cheese.  Anne milks her goats and makes her cheeses on Fantôme Farm in The Driftless Area just a few miles from my own 44 acres.

Wisconsin is becoming a Cornucopia of artisanal cheeses, and Anne blazed the trail.  Because she only sells her cheese locally, I consider myself a very lucky person to live near her.

The article begins:

When Anne Topham gave up academia to make the perfect chèvre, she had no idea that a herd of other artisans would follow in her footsteps.

Anne Topham did not set out to become the Midwest’s godmother of goat cheese, but she has earned the title.  Hailed by the New York Times (read NYT article here ) as Wisconsin’s grand dame of chèvre, a soft goat cheese originating in France, she is acclaimed by foodies far and wide for helping launch the area’s artisanal cheese upsurge.

In the beginning, Topham’s ambitions lay elsewhere.  In the seventies, she was a UW grad student pursuing a doctorate in the history of education.  But she took a break from her research to help her father with spring planting in the rolling hills of western Iowa.

Photos by Andy Manis

“I went from the seventeenth floor of Van Hise to watching cows calve in the pasture and learning how to disc a field. I never went back,” says Topham.  “Living this close to the most elemental parts of life keeps things in perspective for me in a way that – as much as I love the stacks – the library didn’t.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Do you love goat cheese?  Let me  know what you think about this creamy confection.  Sound off with a comment about your best (or worst) experience with goat cheese.   I wasn’t always fond of goat cheese, but when it is really fresh, I love it now.

A Green Home Should Not Take So Many Greenbacks

Today’s guest post is written by Della Hansmann of Whole Trees Architecture and Construction , a young architect who is designing the house we expect to build in 2012.  See more  here.

You don’t have to make a building more expensive or technologically complex to make it sustainable.

Before entering architecture school at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, I spent a year studying issues of justice, ecology and development in the cities and countryside of England, India, Nepal, the Philippines, New Zealand and Mexico. What impressed me most were the simple and functional homes of the families with whom I lived. I returned to the US with the conviction that the places we live in have a profound effect on our lives both within their walls and beyond. Housing matters!

Milfoil Mulch: turning crap into crop

The pond after snowmelt. Check out this same view in summer in the previous post Purple Loosestrife: a very short battle

When I say we have a pond on our land, you need to realize it is a tiny, little jewel box of a pond.  The former owner, making use of Department of Natural Resources grants available at the time, dammed a little ravine and created a modest water catchment basin.  In the spring, flush with snowmelt and rain runoff, it expands to surround a tiny island.  Because it has never dried up in our 5-year tenure, there is probably a small spring trickling in, but as the summer comes on, our pond pulls in on itself to become more of a magnificent mudhole.

At its lowest ebb of 30×90 feet, the frogs and toads still sing its praises, and we dip out of it to irrigate our current plantings.  We have not yet sunk a well or buried cisterns at the corners of the barn, so it is our only source of water, but I’m sure the fact that it’s a little murky just increases its charms to the plants we pour it on.

Right after the ice melts, the pond is pristine and clear.  Then, it grows a beard of lake weed that we now realize is milfoil.  Latin name Myrophilium meaning too many leaves to count.  I would have to agree and then some. Some milfoils are native.  Some are invasive, and the biggest villain is Eurasian Milfoil, which was once sold as an aquarium plant but  slipped into our waterways in the 1940s.

Purple Loosestrife a Very Short Battle

Last Sunday, the sun was shining.  The birds were singing.  Doug and I were  dipping buckets of water from our tiny pond and hauling them in our Powerwagon (learn about the tool that has turned us into superman and wonderwoman here) to all the places we started new plants this year.  Fresh faces are also cropping up on the dam since we have been scything out the invasives there, and a charming purple flower caught my eye.   I scrambled up the slope for a closer look.  It had a square stem, topped with a spear of tiny purple flowers.  Didn’t recognize it. (Add background music in menacing minor key to the soundtrack at this point in the drama.)

We tenderly slipped a purple flower stalk into a cup water to keep it fresh for keying out once we got home.  We found square stems of purple flowers staring at us from an invasive menace list – was this our first sighting of the dreaded Purple Loosestrife?

Prairie Gold

I’ve read that pioneers called their wagons prairie schooners.  If they crossed my acre and a half of restored remnant prairie today, they would be sailing over a sea of flowers.  I can totally relate to the bees.  I am drawn to this blooming bounty and am fueled by it. You can see a map of our land with the prairie remnant highlighted in yellow by clicking here.

If we had not walked this high slope with a naturalist our first year on the land, we might not have realized that we were crossing a remnant prairie. We would have let the rows of young spruce growing there shade out and bury under their needles all the prairie phlox and meadow rue, wild bergamot, compass plant and the vast tribe of sunflowers and asters that are now jumping up to meet the sun.

Climate Change: What Experts Expect for the Upper Midwest

I’m hosting far-flung family from Seattle, Houston and Albany this week, so I’m going to post a link today to an article I wrote for the July/August issue of The Organic Broadcaster

Our dear and dreadful sun (photo credit jalalspages' Flickr)

It begins:

We’ve all read the headlines trumpeting the destructive potential of global warming, filled with phrases like melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and devastating tropical storms.  But what is this going to mean to those of us farming in the Midwest over the coming decades, and what can we do now to meet these challenges?

The Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI), completed a 9-part seminar series in June 2009 titled “Bracing for Impact.” The University of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and other state agencies and institutions have pooled resources to present cutting-edge climate predictions. Their goal:  to develop practical information that can guide all decision makers from government organizations to individuals.

The WICCI study focuses on Wisconsin, and while Dr. Christopher Kucharik, Assistant Professor of Agronomy at UW-Madison, is not familiar with any similar state projects elsewhere in the Midwest, he notes that WICCI’s findings can be applied across state lines, particularly in Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan and parts of Illinois.

The Timeframe of Global Climate Change
WICCI researchers believe that climate change has already begun.  Dr. Michael Notaro, Associate Scientist in the Center for Climatic Research at the UW Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Study, noted that the growing season is now two weeks longer than it was just 20 years ago.  Plant hardiness zones are marching northward.  “Between 1990 and 2006, zone 3 has gone from Wisconsin, and zone 5 has moved in,” he said.

Jack Williams of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies put the timeframe into perspective.  “You see curves of temperature rising over the century, and it seems pretty abstract, but it’s happening right here and right now.  We are in the beginning of a ramp up, and things will be happening faster and faster.  My three-year-old, Eliza, may see temperatures increase from 3.2 to 6.8 °F in her life time.  That is more than temperatures have changed in the past 22,000 years since the last glacier.”

Read the whole article by clicking  here .

My next post on Friday will be a photo essay on what is currently blooming in our prairie.

LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK.  CLICK COMMENT AND SOUND OFF HERE!

CSAs Madison Style or Insuring Good Nutrition

Mom was right.

We should eat our vegetables.  Now even some insurance companies want you to supersize your salad (read about this below).  But more than that, if we choose vegetables that are produced locally as much as we can, we will improve not only our own health but the health of our local food producing network.

An up and running local food network will be doubly welcome when gas prices start to make the current system of flying in or trucking our broccoli and blueberries from California or Peru or apples from New Zealand untenable.  (I’ve been to New Zealand. I did not step off the plane feeling fresh, and I suspect that your Granny Smith arriving on the return flight isn’t feeling very fresh either.)

Fresh is sweet corn picked this dawn and stacked up in gorgeous pyramids on a table at your local farmer’s market.  Fresh is crisp lettuce with a little dirt still clinging to the base of the leaves and real baby carrots (not those old ones ground into baby shape by a giant carrot mill).  Fresh is picking up your produce once a week from your CSA.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is an arrangement between households and farmers who work together.  Households pay an annual fee in the winter or spring and then collect a share of the season’s harvest all summer, which is delivered to a garage in their neighborhood for regular pick-up.  Many CSA farmers also hold special picking events in their fields to connect you with the place your food comes from.

The CSA I belong to, Vermont Valley Community Farm,  just held a Pea Pick last weekend in which hundreds of CSA members came out to the pea patch and picked 2,400 pounds of peas!  That saves the members a bit of the cost and brings you very close to the peas that you will put up and eat for the rest of the year.  I simply KNOW that the fruit and vegetables I pick myself taste better.

But, you say, local food is just for rich people.  It’s too costly.  True, local farmers don’t enjoy the subsidies that allow agribusiness to sell for less than it cost to produce.  Remember that when you pay a local farmer, you are paying the true cost and a fair price for your food.  It’s the right thing to do, but it’s not always easy.  So I want to spread the word about the way we do it in Madison, Wisconsin.

Madison, WI, the biggest city near my land, is home to the Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition (MACSAC), which coordinates 35 farms that serve Madison, Milwaukee, Dubuque, the Twin Cities and surrounding areas.

MACSAC  also coordinates a program called Health Plan Partners, which includes several pioneering insurance companies that offer  rebates of up to $200 a year to their customers who eat local food from CSAs.  (So now it’s not only your mother telling you to eat your vegetables because she loves you – your insurance company is telling you because they don’t want to pay your medical bills, and they have the stats to prove you are healthier if you  eat those veggies.)  That includes my insurer, Physicians Plus,  Group Health Cooperative SCS,  Dean Health Plan,   and several others.

Barb Perkins, who with her husband owns Vermont Valley Farms, says, “A lot of people who normally wouldn’t have heard about CSAs are learning about them through their HMOs.  And many people are willing to take the chance and join because they get the rebate.  It’s amazing to me that these HMOs have made the connection between health and healthy eating.”

She continues, “My husband and I go to conferences around  the country.  We tell people what Wisconsin in doing, so the word is getting out, and there are going to be people in other states pestering their HMOs to do this.”

Area CSAs have another way of making healthy, local eating available to people who might not be able to afford it.  Their sign up sheet asks members to donate to help low-income people get a food share.  This year Vermont Valley Farm members alone donated $8,435, and are subsidizing 29 shares.

“We have never turned anyone away,” Perkens says.  “If we know of a member who needs help, for example some members couldn’t rejoin this year because a family member had lost a job, we were instantly able to respond and say, ‘We have financial assistance for you.’ We work with MACSAC too.  They do a lot of outreach to identify people who could use assistance.

MACSAC coordinates a Partner Shares Program which raises money for an Assistance Fund to help subsidize CSA shares for low-income households through fundraising, grants and donations.

The only thing that makes that fresh food taste better than buying from local suppliers or picking it yourself, is sharing it.

My next post on Tuesday will be a summary of an article I wrote recently for Organic Broadcaster on Climate Change and what experts predict for the Upper Midwest.

What are your experiences with a CSA?  Please click on Commnet and sound off!

Building Our Timberframe Barn

There is a long and continuing saga to the barn you see in my blog title up there.  Our farm needed a barn — someplace to store the equipment we were accumulating to take care of the land.  A place we could camp in comfort, and a staging area to build our house.

We mulled it over three years, while our daughter studied architecture at the University of Minnesota.  We visualized something traditional, but Della sketched an asymmetrical roof to take best advantage of the solar angle for PV panels some day.

In the loft, the short, high north roof let us keep the building as low as possible and still have room to walk up to the wall and look out a window.   We added a lean-to greenhouse on the south side, and built into the hill such that you walk in on the ground floor in front and walk out on the loft floor in the back.  We liked it.  We wanted to build something that would last.  We wanted timber frame.

We took Della’s drawing to Mike Yaker, and he said he could do it.  After getting the first cost estimate, we dropped the idea of insulating and heating it.  Once the house is built, it will not need either, so why waste the resources?

We are still working on this barn.  Hope to get the batten boards and the rest of the windows in this summer now that the Wild Parsnip campaign is winding down.  See my post Warning: Wild Parsnip Season here.

This being a photo essay, I’ll stop yakking now and let the pictures do the work.

The four corners of the barn with lean-to greenhouse in our imagination.

Doug and Della stand in the door of her first building.

What an exciting day Raising Day was!

The roof boards came from trees with oak wilt that we harvested carefully and milled a few feet from the barn site.

The shape of these rafters always makes me think of someone throwing their arms into the sky in pure jubiliation. This will be our view in the loft -- once we get the floor boards in.

The first two winters, we stapled plastic sheeting over the greenhouse.

Last fall we got polycarbonate panels on the greenhouse roof. Still have to finish the door this summer. Check out that copper-colored metal roof.

My next post on Friday will be about the way several health insurance programs in Madison WI offer rebates to clients who buy food through CSAs.  How cool is that?

Idle Thoughts — Turn the Damned Thing Off!

Because I don’t live on my land yet, I have to drive there, and I am painfully aware of the gas I’m burning up. It’s one of those shades-of-green things. I feel the work I’m doing on my 44 acres is good for the planet, but that good is sooted up with the carbon I burn to get there. So I’ve been on the lookout for ways to green up my driving.

Idling pumps a lot of extra carbon, toxins and wasted dollars out of here.

I got some good tips at the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair workshop last month. (See my previous post, Ten Ways to Cut Gas Costs and Save the Planet here. ) One of the biggest things I got out of the workshop was STOP IDLING. Further research on line has led me to IDLING GETS YOU NOWHERE. YOU GET ZERO MILES PER GALLON WHILE IDLING.. The word is getting out. I’d like to mention that many years ago when I was living in the Netherlands, I remember waiting in line to cross a river on one of the countless Dutch ferries. A Dutchman rapped on my window. “Turn off your engine!” he barked in a voice dripping with disbelief that I could be so careless and wasteful.

The facts are on his side. According to the Environmental Defense Fund and countless others:

1. For every 10 minutes your engine is off, you prevent one pound of carbon dioxide from being released into the air. (remember Global Warming? – see __ ) The Sierra Club says that U.S. cars burn some 1.4 billion gallons of fuel just idling (and we aren’t even counting trucks here!) That adds up to 58 million tons of carbon dioxide while we are just sitting there, going nowhere.
2. Cutting emissions makes the air healthier. What we are spewing has been linked to asthma, heart disease, chronic bronchitis and cancer.
3. Keep the money in your wallet. You waste between 1/5 to 7/10 of a gallon of fuel for every hour you idle. Sierra Club says the amount of fuel we burn as a nation while waiting for fast food is estimated at 50 million gallons a year! (World-wide fast food expansion plans are well underway, and it has been predicted that if China and India line up at their shiny, new McDonald’s and KFC franchises, they will idle away 30 billion gallons of gas every year.
   

   We are supersizing our pollution too.

   I don’t think it will be too many more years till we will be wishing we still had the fuel we burned up for a Big Mac.

So,

• Turn it off, if you think you will be waiting more than 10 seconds. Idling for that long will waste more gas than re-starting the engine.
• Warm your engine by driving, not idling. Electronic engines don’t need to warm up anymore – not even in winter. The best way to warm an engine is by starting up slowly. Your engine will warm up twice as quickly when driven than it will sitting at idle.
• Warm yourself by driving, not idling. The car heating system will get heat to you faster while driving. Also, sitting in an idling car to keep warm means you are breathing your own dirty exhaust as it leaks into the cabin as well as wasting gas and poisoning the earth.
• Protect your engine. Frequent re-starts add no more than $10 or wear to your car per year, while idling can cost from $70 to $650 depending on your car, your idle practices and fuel prices.

Take better care of my car, my lungs and my planet just by twisting my wrist? What’s not to like?

One final note:

Alert reader,  Cuong Huynh added this comment, with which I totally agree!

Shutting down your engine while idling is a valid way to increase gas mileage. Personally, I would recommend that drivers need to understand some downsides and implications of this technique. Because the engine is not operating, systems that depend on engine power will cease to function. These include non-operating/harder-to-operate steering and brakes, non-operating accessories like the A/C, while other accessories like headlights and radios are on battery power only. So if a driver understands this and is aware of the fact that you are not in control of the car, then he/she can decide on the risk level to take. Two serious additional things to consider: it may be against the law to do this where you live, and in the case of emergency you may become a sitting duck, especially near or on a train track;)

My next post will be a photo essay on building our timber frame barn.

LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK. JUST CLICK “COMMENT” (BELOW, LEFT) AND SOUND OFF!