“Take a trip to Jeff Poppen’s Long Hungry Creek Farm and you’ll find a year-round farm. You’re also likely to stumble across some agricultural teaching moments or discover yourself in the middle of a 1,000-person celebration. And it’s possible you’ll find all of that occurring simultaneously.

 Poppen, known to many as the Barefoot Farmer, uses his land to grow and raise food like plenty of other farmers do. But much more happens around his 250 acres in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee, and most of it centers around Poppen’s many passions — a passion for small family farms, for community, for getting young people back on the land, and for healing the environment.…”

https://www.mnn.com/leaderboard/stories/the-barefoot-farmer-grows-more-than-food

Comment from Anonymous

On east side of highway. Everything this lady sells is fresh and good.

By way of contrast, I ate a banana from my hotel’s “continental breakfast” table this morning and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Thinking back, I recall that in Costa Rica, one of the world’s big banana producers, the bunches of bananas on the trees are ensconced in blue plastic bags permeated with insecticides. The Ticos call them “condoms.”

The bananas from this stand are small and sweet, with an almost citrus-like tang.

Rambutan fruits. (Not prickly, but soft on the exterior.) Inside is a tangy gelatinous fruit around a large seed.

Amidst the wonders and beauty of this part of the world, I find a fierce battle raging between concerned residents and corporate chemical/poison interests. There are 2 sides to the controversy, I’ve learned. I asked Wayne Jacintho, a Kauai photographer, who are the people against the GMO/poison folks; he replied: “Everybody who cares about people and creatures that are being poisoned, everybody who cares about clean water and air and soil and the ocean…”

On the other side are the chemical companies, and locals who need jobs.

Here is a letter written by Wayne this summer to a local paper in southwest Kauai:

FEEDING THE WORLD
In Aug. 3rd’s Garden Island, yet another letter proclaiming the chemical companies’ noble reason for existence: feeding the world.
And the heartrending revelation, by a Dow Chemical testifier the night of July 31st, that they, in conjunction with Bill & Melinda Gates, are developing a drought-resistant sorghum for some African country or countries. Yay!

Then, unwanted, unbidden questions arose, extinguishing the thumping koom-bah-yah in my heart. 
I ask that gentleman to answer these questions, if only to restore the almost unbearable lightness I felt upon first hearing his stirring words:

1. Will these sorghum seeds be given, or will they be sold, to these people?

2. Will these plants at maturity have viable seeds, or will a ‘terminator’ gene have shut them down?

3. If the resultant seeds are viable, will those farmers be able to save some for replanting, or will they be punished if they try to do so?

4. If these farmers are not allowed to save and replant “their” seeds, will they have to buy each year’s seed from you?

5. Can these seeds be grown without special needs, or do these farmers have to buy Dow Chemical herbicide, pesticide, and synthetic fertilizers for which these seeds may have been “engineered”?

6. If these farmers have to buy these seeds, (and, if necessary, other Dow chemicals), and if there are unforseen disasters, natural or otherwise, and they then fall into debt to Dow Chemical, what will be the fate of these farmers and their lands?

Please answer straightforwardly, with source references.

Naturally, Wayne never got an answer.

See my post here of 2 months ago: https://www.lloydkahn.com/?s=roundup

Granville Island is a public market across a narrow stretch of water from downtown Vancouver. Lots of tourists, yes, but it’s solid. Everything there seems to be of high quality, not the usual krap you see at street fairs. The food market is the best I’ve ever seen. Here are some photos from last month.That’s Victor Pollan standing by his artistically designed fish display.

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A few photos yesterday in Ladysmith, a nice little town south of Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island. Cumberland is another such nearby town. There are houses for sale for under 200K. Old mining towns. Small homes built for workers that have the appeal and aesthetics of simplicity. (The below isn’t one of those homes, it just seemed seemed like a unique doorway cut into the corner of a sort of cube.)