FARM NEWS

The Grow Tower

Since we don’t have an outdoor nursery this year we decided to build one indoors. It uses LED lights and a fan that blows on the seedlings to help strengthen them. Right now it’s filled with onions and flowers. We’re praying for an early spring because we are itching to get our plant babies in the ground!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT 🍎

The Rise Of Organic

This is a video by CNBC about the current state of the organic industry. Most people don’t know what the term “organic” truly means and I thought they did a great job explaining it.

The one thing I didn’t agree with was the idea that all organically-grown food has the same nutrition as conventionally-grown food. I could see how factory farmed organic food could have similar nutritional value as conventional factory farmed food because they use a lot of the same practices. However, organic farms can vary greatly in their practices which can have a significant effect on nutrient levels.

In their book “What Your Food Ate” authors David Montgomery and Anne Bikle conducted a study to compare the nutritional levels between food grown on no-till regenerative farms and on organic tillage-based farms. They discovered that all of the regenerative farms in their study had more nutrient dense produce than their organic, non-regenerative counterparts.

A regenerative no-till farm like ours can be certified organic and will therefore be lumped into the same pile as all other certified organic farms, despite using very different farming practices and potentially producing higher quality food. This can cause even more confusion amongst consumers and is one of the many reasons why we decided not to get certified organic. If you would like to know all of our reasons read my article called “Certified Organic Is Hurting Small-Scale Farmers”.

There is really only one way to know how your food is being grown, and that’s to know the people who are growing it.