Iron Chef - Low Milage Edition

This week, in Sustainable Agriculture, we had another famous Iron Chef Competition. However, this Iron Chef was different. Over the past couple of weeks, we have shifted our focus of learning from how to be a sustainable farmer, to why it is important and the aspects that go into it. More specifically, we have learned about the mileage that food, especially processed, goes through in order to get to to our doorsteps. For example, I learned that the average food item travels about 1,500 miles from leaving the farm/factory to arriving at the grocery store and finally being bought and brought home. We learned the importance of low mileage food as it has many environmental benefits. So, because we have learned about this, our Iron Chef competition theme was about low mileage. My group made a potato hash with sunny side up eggs. Our potatoes and rosemary came straight from our farm. Overall, we totalled about 800 miles for our dish when the average same dish travels about 2300. The winning team made a beautiful salad, with all their ingredients straight from the farm, totaling 0 miles of distance. Before learning this material, I had never realized how much of an impact food processing and travel is. I learned that if you buy it, you support it so in the future I am going to try to limit the mileage of traveling of the food that I consume.

-Jackson Barry

Making Food Miles

Since we have come back from break, one of the largest things that our class has been focusing on as a whole is food miles and how it relates to sustainability. Often we forget how far our food has traveled just for us to be able to eat it. Depending on how far away the product is from, tells you how much pollution and fossil fuels were used in order to transport it. Thinking about this has made me question a lot about where I should get my food from because just simply using vanilla to make a cake has to come all the way from Madagascar. This week on Wednesday, we had our first iron chef of the semester. Our theme was to use the least amount of food miles possible to create our meal. For our groups dish, we decided to make a kale and potato saute and a salad. All of our ingredients except olive oil, lemon, and apple were taken from our farm. It is interesting to know where all of our food is coming from and how all of the ingredients we used were local. Having the majority of your food products grown locally helps to reduce pollution, make you feel better about your food, and makes it taste better. —Elle

Where does our food come from?

This week in class we focused on determining how far our food travels before it gets to our plate. To do this, we took a look at cookies and each of their ingredients' origins. I chose the chocolate chip cookie specifically, and with 9 ingredients there was a lot of stuff to calculate. First, we looked at where our ingredients are native to. For example, Brown Sugar comes from Brazil, Chocolate comes from West Africa, and our other ingredients all had their own native places. We totaled up the distance from those places with the ingredients and added them up at the end. We did this again and looked into local ingredient replacements, such as getting butter from a Clover farm in Petaluma instead of getting it from Minnesota. We added the distances up for each ingredient in the cookie and determined that in order for us to eat one chocolate chip cookie, over 21000 miles of ground had to be covered. Compare this to the 5500+ miles that would be covered with the local options and it is clear that we need to consider where we are getting our ingredients from because it can and will make a difference.

- Jared Robinow

Food Miles and it's Impacts

As we go into semester two of sustainable agriculture, were now moving away from the idea of how we can be sustainable to the idea of why were actually choosing to do so. To follow this, we as a class have began a brand new unit that focuses on the idea of food and the comparison on how it's grown from a sustainable farmer, to inside an industrial factory, to even how the two effect politics and our federal government. This week students were given the opportunity to take on an assignment known as "Food Miles" that primarily focused on you as the student actually learning where each of the ingredients found in whatever type of cookie you choose, on where it was grown, whether that be grown in our local area, out of state, country, to how the ingredients grown were transported from the grown place to your local market or superstore, whether that be by truck, plane, cargo ship, etc. On top of all that, we even learned about the C02 or carbon dioxide emission that went into the exact mileage or distance traveled from where ever it was produced or grown from California. For example, if you were to look back at the data table included in the assignment, the distance for chocolate to get from where it was grown, "Dominican Republic" to travel all the way back to our home state California, it would take over 3,000+ miles of traveling just for it to reach California. Although a necessity item in making Chocolate Chip Cookies, the cost of C02 emission involved in the entire process is defiantly something to consider when making any type of food related item. With this assignment, I not only learned more about what goes into some of the food I consume on a day to day basis, but also where these ingredients come from and how the traveling process can effect the environment around us.

- Matthew Pollock

Holiday farm care

Over winter break, there was an opportunity to visit the farm. Mr. Stewart created a sign-up list, and all the students were able to sign up to go to the farm if they wanted to. I went a few days after break started. The main objectives were to water the hoop house, since the crops were covered from any rainwater, and to check and see if the beds needed weeding or watering. Since it had been rainy, there was no need for me to water the beds. I used the water from under the sink to be more sustainable while I was watering the crops in the hoop house. I noticed that the majority of the beds had Bermuda Grass growing and was surrounding the plants. This is due to the high water tables on the farm. Before we left on break, everyone tried to take out all the invasive and non-invasive weeds in their beds without disrupting the soil. It was interesting to see how much can grow back in such a short amount of time. One aspect that most people will be working on as we go back to the farm is maintaining the weeds in their beds. The weeds take the nutrients that other crops use. It is vital to remove the weeds as we begin planting more crops for the new season.

- Hannah

Winter planting

This week is the first week after winter break, meaning that we have to catch up on a lot of maintenance work from the past few weeks as well as preparing for the next growing season.  We began this week in class by outlining what new plants we will be growing in our beds. We did this by determining what amount of growing room we have and deciding what to grow there based on if our bed had been growing heavy feeders or givers.  After we determined what we will be growing where we went out to the farm to weed it and cut back growth to ensure that the path is clear. My personal bed had a large amount of bell beans growing over the path, so we cut them at the base to make it easier to walk by.  We also removed the potato plants because they were dead and we needed more room to grow new vegetables that are well suited for the winter. We also removed the weeds in the sections where we were going to grow new plants and from where we have plants that will continue to grow.  Essentially this week we have prepared to grow new plants in our bed suited for the winter. - Calvin

Farm City

On Thursday, the Redwood sustainable agriculture class went out to the farm for the first time since school started up again. We weeded our beds and checked on how our plants had handled the weed takeover. To my surprise, everything looked great! Seeing how well the plants had done on their own, such as the bell beans forming on the branches in the bed next to mine, and the young broccoli heads in my groups' bed, growing larger (like the ones I get at the store), reminded me of a book I read over break. It's called Farm City by Novella Carpenter. It is about Carpenters experience in Oakland CA, turning an empty lot into what she calls an urban farm. The way she describes all the hard work she put into her crops and animals, and how it benefited her yields, now inspires me when I am out on our Redwood farm.

While I was picking at the forest of weeds in class today, I couldn't help but think how well Carpenter's vegetables turned out after all she put into her garden. This caused me to imagine how my vegetables would turn out. Would I have an abundance like the Oakland Farmer, having plenty to share for the passerby who would stop by to take a little(or a lot) of what Novella Carpenter had grown? Would my bed fail to produce a sufficient amount of vegetables, resulting in having to hoard what little vegetables we had for ourselves, such as Carpenter after one particularly harsh winter? These were the questions that ran through my mind, as I continued plucking weeds.

Looking over at my small pile of weeds, not only did I realize I needed to pick up my pace, but I also remembered Carpenter, plucking her poultry. She describes this process thoroughly in one chapter of her book. I continued thinking about how our farm reminded me of Carpenters' farm, and how much I had learned from her book. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how entertaining, informational, and inspirational her story is to farmers everywhere, even at Redwood High School. I strongly recommend Novella Carpenter's book, Farm City to anyone who wants to have a sense of the hard work that goes into farming, and how one's work can affect both their yields and lives.

-Elsa Davis

Farming during the winter

The winter months are a time to prepare for the coming year by budgeting for and purchasing farm requirements such seeds and fertilizers.  The winter is coolor and leaves begin to change colors. September is when most grains and other spring-planted crops are harvested. This helps restore nutrients in the soil that the last crop used up. Farmers begin planted crops such as winter wheat. During the winter it gets really hard for the farmers to farm because the sun sets early, and you can't grow tomatoes or even most greens with such low light. One way to keep plants growing is to install a hoop house. This helps grow plants that are typically grown during the spring or summer time grow during the winter time. Vegetables are great to grow during the winter time. For example, Garlic, Spring Onion, Broad Beans, Peas, Winter Salads, Asparagus, and Onions. Farmers during the winter don't stop farming. The winter months are a time to prepare for the coming year by budgeting for and purchasing things like seed and fertilizer. Some crop farmers store their crops on-farm, and spend winter shipping grain from their farm to ethanol plants, feed mills, and river terminals, where hrain gets loaded onto barges and shipped far and wide. Many farmers work on farm equipment like tractores and planters in preparation for spring tillage and planting. It is in this time of year that many farmers also make the final decisions about what crops to plant on which fields. A lot goes into that final decision, including factors like what crop was in the field that previous year, what the relative profitability of various crops are, known disease pressure that might be in the soil on that particular field, and the soil types of field. Winter for livestock farmers is a bit different than it is for crop farmers.   —Yahya