Straus Family Creamery

This week in sustainable agriculture a speaker from Straus Family Creamery  joined us named Alex Fox. She is a Redwood graduate who went on to major in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz. She also has a master in Green Business. After interning at multiple different places, she was hired by  Straus Creamery where she is now the sustainability manager.


Straus Creamery is the 1st certified organic dairy farm. They have a total of 8 farms that provide them milk. The company thrives off its four core values of: sustainability, innovation, integrity, and respect. Straus makes many efforts to reduce its ecological footprint. Ms. Fox mentioned a few of the steps such as: Annual sustainability reports and waste audits, methane digester, reusable glass bottles, electric vehicle fleets, and joining the Marin Carbon Project. The Methane Digester was one of the practices that intrigued me the most. The digester takes manure that is washed off of the barn floors into an anaerobic environment where bacteria is able to digest the methane and produce a solid that can be used to fertilize the fields, and creates electricity that the farm can use. This reduces their methane and electricity usage massively. The Marin Carbon Project is another way that the company is able to help reverse the effects that the farms may be having on the environment. Straus has created a 20 year carbon farming plan. This plan helps answer the question of "how can we take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and get it back into the ground." It includes adding ½ an inch of compost to the the soil which removes one ton of compost per acre for 30 years. It seems like such a simple addition that actually makes a world of the difference.



I would really like to thank Alex Fox for taking time to share with us her story and the ways in which Straus Family Creamery is making a difference help lead the way to a sustainable future. (Pictures are courtesy of the Straus Family Creamery website.)

Local Farms

This week in Sust Ag, a lot of things have been happening. In the past two days, we have had two guest speakers from a variety of different sustainability backgrounds. Alex Fox, who is the Sustainability at Straus Farms, discussed thoroughly about her experiences in the food world, especially about how Strauss farms works to mitigate climate change. At their farm, for example, they use a "Methane Digester", which is a tarp that suppresses methane from being put into the atmosphere and manages to turn that into electricity. Since Dairy farms are big emitters of methane, it make sense to use these type of devices to stop climate change. Unfortunately, methane digesters are expensive and difficult to maintain, which is why they are not being used as widespread across California.

Sarah, a former Redwood student as well as Alex, works as an herbalist to use products from the natural world for medicinal purposes. She talked about using Aloe Vera for skin irritation, chewing up Yarrow to make a paste to stop bleeding, and how eating bitter things like Dandelion leaves is "sweet to the stomach", as it improves gut health. These have been the main things we have experienced in class during this week.

However, outside of class, students have been working on their Farm reports by going to visit local Marin County farms or visiting local farmer's markets and interviewing them. For interviews, students have been asking farmers what they plant, when they plant, how they plant, and how much compost do you use among other questions. For students who visited farms, we were able to observe first hand how farms go about planting. Last weekend, my group visited the Green Gulch Farm in Muir Beach where we saw a variety of different plants in smaller beds but noticed that most of their bigger fields had only bell beans planted in them. This was an exciting and interesting experience for both me and my group mates.

JD Mancini

Field Trip: IVC

This week in Sustainable agriculture we went to College of Marin Indian Valley campus farm. The Indian Valley Campus farm grows over a hundred fruits and vegetables. We went to the farm to learn about their farming practices and how we can be better farmers by implementing some of their wise techniques. Something I learned on the field trip was that plants grow better during the new moon. After we toured the farm we broke up into different groups and worked.

For block day this week on the farm our class was working really hard on cutting down the fava bean plants and putting them into the compost pile. Overall it was a very productive week and I'm excited the class is planting potatoes next w

eek.

Blaise Van Brunt

Stan and Dogbane beetle

This week in our Sustainable Agriculture class we had a guest speaker named Stan who came in to talk to us about hydroponics. Hydroponics is a method of growing plants in an "aerated" nutrient solution composed of water and fertilizer. We learned that using hydroponics, you can save at least 90% of water compared to a soil culture, there is no fertilizer runoff, it provides for direct and immediate control of the plant, and prevents transplant shock. It also isolates the plants from diseases or pests found in soil. By using hydroponics, you can increase the levels of Vitamin C and Vitamin E, and many other nutrients in your food harvest. We learned that NASA also conducted its own test with hydroponics, and found that it reduced the amount of water they used by 98%, fertilizer by 60%, and pesticides by 100%.

On another note, my group member Carly found a companion in the rye of our bed. This companion is technically a pest, but many people appreciate the colors that this pest has on its body. This pest name is a Dogbane Beetle. Its scientific name is Chrysochus auratus. The dogbane leaf beetle has a special type of color that shines and changes as the insect changes position or we change position looking at it. This changing color is called iridescence. The beetles' iridescence is produced by special body structures and light.  Dogbane leaf beetles feed on prairie plants such as milkweeds, Indian hemp, and dogbane. I wasn't able to get a clear picture of the dogbane beetle, so this is a picture I found online that best resembles the one we saw in the farm.

-Jean-Marc Beddow