An Action Plan for Healthier Farms and People in New Mexico

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New Mexico faces a stark paradox: ranking close to the top of the list in food insecurity and child and senior hunger, while about one-quarter of our population suffers from obesity and numerous diet-related chronic diseases. Public meal programs are critical opportunities for addressing the health and well-being of New Mexicans and there is real promise for those fruits and vegetables to be provided by New Mexico growers. -from The Power of Public Procurement: An Action Plan for Healthier Farms and People in New Mexico,September 2014

Cover: Seed Art Mural, Bernalillo County Youth Detention Center
Photo Courtesy of: Jade Leyva, Curator for SEEDS:A Collective Voice Multimedia
Exhibits, Community Seed Mural Projects Co-Artist & Coordinator

Over the past week we published blog posts on the links between health and hunger from the Bread for the World Institute, New Mexico Voices for Children and and First Choice Community Health Care. An important aspect of providing healthy food to the population, particularly low-income communities, is to ensure that fruits and vegetables are available at affordable levels. The produce does not need to be trucked from California. Rather, there is an abundance locally.

A little more than a year ago (in September 2014), Farm to Table and New Mexico State University (via the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agricultural Business, the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences and half a dozen agricultural extension offices) published a report that attempts to identify and understand the potential and current barriers that New Mexico farmers and New Mexico’s public institutions face when trying to sell and purchase locally grown fruits and vegetables for their respective meal programs.

The report, entitled The Power of Public Procurement: An Action Plan for Healthier Farms and People in New Mexico, recognizes that a potentially significant market exists for the sale of New Mexico grown produce to the State’s public institutions. This is particularly true for the school districts’ food service programs.

"A large, and until recently, untapped, commercial exchange may be fostered between fruit and vegetable growers and the public officials who administer the procure-ment systems of public institutions," researchers said in the executive summary of the report. "Yet, practicalities and barriers currently impede the process."

The authors of the report make a number of recommendations at various agency and inter-agency levels, placing a strong emphasis on schools, but also on senior centers, state corrections institutions, and farming and agriculture.  Read the executive summary and the full report.

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Garden Protection Plan

2:55 AM in Aqua, garden, plan, protection

When we moved to our new place last August, we had just enough time to put in a small fall garden and get a few meals of kale from the 9 x 3 bed.  We also had enough time to raise a few meat chickens, and were planning on scaling up both endeavors considerably this spring.  Although it was a little painful through the fall to not have a full-size garden with tomatoes, chard, etc., it was nice that we had a chance to realize just how brazen and shameless the squirrels and raccoons in our neighborhood are.

So, now that were planning our garden for this coming summer, we know that were going to need a multi-pronged squirrel-deterrent system in order to bring our crops to harvest.  We also know, having studied squirrel behavior for many years, that simply testing their tiny rodent brains with increasingly complex challenges is unlikely to keep them out completely, but would definitely make gardening harder for us.  Instead, we need solutions that are more...permanent.  Heres what we came up with.

Our place is surrounded by dogs, so our primary line of defense (after the fences around the yard) will be a series of squirrel launchers that send the furry vegetable pirates into the neighbors yards.  Not that we want to make the squirrels our neighbors problem, but theyve all got dogs who will quite enjoy helping us out.  (And both permaculturalists and ninjas recognize the principle of working within ones surroundings.)  The second line of defense will be a squirrel pit trap.  What awaits the squirrels at the bottom of the pit trap is still a matter of debate.  A snapping turtle?  Punji sticks made from sharpened toothbrushes?  A tunnel that leads to Texas?  (Let us know your vote in the comments section.)  The last line of defense will be a marauding honey badger, discussed at length below.

Weve done a lot of thinking about it, and the more YouTube videos we watch, the more it seems like a (trained) honey badger would be an awesome livestock/produce protection plan.  They hunt both day and night, and have no fear of large predators.  They eat anything from grubs to snakes to raccoon-sized rodents.  They can even climb trees to get to the raccoons, which gives them a leg up on canine-type marauders.  They can be socialized and trained, which might even mean that after a few generations in domestication, they could be deterred from chickens and bees.  Theyre also excellent diggers, so they can help with soil preparation and root crop harvesting.

The only legitimate downside is that tame or trained honey badgers arent currently available to the general public.  Unfortunately, were also explicitly forbidden from owning a badger in our neighborhood.  But while the honey badger vernacular seems to consist mostly of hissing and snarling, if we could teach it to bark, we might be able to convince an animal control officer its a weird-looking dog.

In any case, we think there is a legitimate business opportunity here for anyone with experience in importing (or smuggling), breeding, and training exotic and dangerous wild animals, influencing policy decisions regarding what counts as a pet, and marketing progressive ideas to typically conservative crowds.  Let us know if you want to partner up on this venture! (We dont bring any of those skills to the table, though.)

Now that weve got our anti-squirrel system figured out, we just have to decide what to plant in the garden!  Thats a nice position to be in.


How do you protect your garden from mammalian intruders?  Do you have any ideas for improving our system?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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FRAC Unveils Plan of Action to End Hunger in America

5:55 AM in action, america, Aqua, end, frac, hunger, in, of, plan, to, unveils

The 2016 election debate has already begun. It will help frame the issues that the next President and Congress, as well as state and local officials, will address. Hunger — its causes, its impact, and its solutions — must be part of the debate and agenda for all parties and all candidates. Polling shows Democrats, Independents, Republicans, men, women, and voters from all parts of the country think that hunger is a serious problem in this country, and the government needs to invest and lead more to address it. This commitment of American voters must become part of the election discussion, and every candidate at every level of government should be asked to issue a plan to address hunger.  -Food Reasearch and Action Center

The effort to shine the spotlight on hunger during the 2016 presidential campaign is under way on many fronts. Vote to End Hunger, an effort led by six anti-hunger organizations--The Alliance to End Hunger, Bread for the World, Feeding America, Meals on Wheels America, No Kid Hungry-Share Our Strength, and RESULTS--officially launched its campaign this past week.  This campaign focuses on the target of ending hunger in our country and globally by 2030.

A second effort, led by the Circle of Protection, Sojourners and Bread for the World, asked the presidential candidates to produce a video answering the question, “What would you do as president to offer help and opportunity to hungry and poor people in the United States and around the world?” As of Oct. 17, nine candidates (six Republicans and three Democrats) had submitted videos. 

Eight-Point Plan
Another prominent anti-hunger organization, the Food Research and Action Center, has put together a blueprint to end hunger in the United States by 2030. The Plan of Action to End Hunger in America, suggests the timing is right to make an all-out effort to eliminate hunger in our country.  Earlier efforts, including President Barack Obamas campaign pledge in 2008 to tackle hunger in America, were hampered by a major downturn in the U.S. economy.

"When Mr. Obama became President, he inherited an economy suffering the most drastic downturn in three-quarters of a century. Giant banks and businesses teetered on the brink. Unemployment leapt up and wages fell. Hunger and poverty both rose rapidly. In 2007, 36 million Americans lived in food insecure households. In 2009, that number was 50 million."

"Now, seven years after Mr. Obama made his anti-hunger pledge, the economy is in considerably better shape, though far from fully recovered. While hunger in this rich nation is unacceptable, even in the worst of times, the recovery changes the dynamic, making American hunger both more unacceptable and more solvable," said the FRAC report.

The Plan of Action to End Hunger in America, offers eight essential strategies for decisively attacking hunger.

1. Create jobs, raise wages, increase opportunity, and share prosperity;
2. Improve government income-support programs for struggling families;
3. Strengthen SNAP;
4. Strengthen Child Nutrition Programs;
5. Target supports to especially vulnerable populations;
6. Work with states, localities, and nonprofits to expand and improve participation in federal nutrition programs;
7. Make sure all families have convenient access to reasonably priced, healthy food;
8. Build political will.

The eighth point is very important, and the discussion can begin in the context of the Presidential, US Congressional, state legislative and gubernatorial campaigns.Vote to End Hunger and FRACs campaign are important tools to discuss federal initiatives, particularly in light of the U.S. presidential and congressional elections. The issue is also important in state legislative and gubernatorial campaigns and elections for city council or county commission. So, go to town halls and candidate forums, write letters to the editor and organize discussion groups in your church or community group.  Its all important work.

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A One Year Meal Plan Or What Should We Grow This Year

12:31 AM in a, Aqua, grow, meal, one, or, plan, should, this, we, what, year

This time of year is prime time for garden planning around these parts.  As we were thinking about what we might want to grow this year, we came around to the question of, "Well, what did we eat last year?"  We have a partial record of what we made right here on the blog, so that was a good place to start.  From there, we just had to fill in the things we normally eat for breakfast, lunch, and supper that we dont blog about. There is always a lot of variability depending on whats available (or on sale), the time of the year, how much time were at home, how much snacking on high-sugar dried fruits we do while waiting for the other to come home so we can explosively greet them when they walk in the door (like Hobbes greets Calvin), etc., but as a ballpark figure, could we make an estimate for food intake, assuming three servings per person per day?

The answer is yes!  And the estimate is fascinating. [...says Jake as Katie snores...]  If youve been following this blog for any amount of time, you probably know that a spreadsheet is about to appear.  And so we begin, with three sets of columns: one each for supper, breakfast, and lunch.

Into each set of columns, we enter recipes (copied and pasted from memory or the internet), specify the number of times per year were going to prepare them, and make sure units and ingredient names are consistent (e.g., that we dont say tomato in one recipe and tomatoes in another).

Then we use a pivot table (one each for supper, breakfast, and lunch) to count everything up.  Its a bummer we dont know how to make a pivot table from more than one range at a time (theres probably a way), but thats ok.  The workaround isnt too hard. From each individual pivot table, we create a master pivot table.  From the master pivot table, we can estimate how much of everything we need to acquire during the course of the year.  For example, we learn that we need about 54 dozen eggs, 49 gallons of milk, and 110 loaves of bread (assuming 12 slices per loaf).  If youve been in our kitchen, you know that works out to a surprisingly accurate figure of roughly one dozen eggs, one gallon of milk, and two loaves of bread per week.  And also 23 pounds of mushrooms, which sounds delicious.  Model validated!

More importantly (and to the point), we can estimate how many pounds of vegetables well have to grow and how many pounds of meat well have to catch to be self-sufficient.

Clearly, if we want to keep taking carrots to work for lunch, well need to grow a ton. (Or, a one-fourteenth of a ton, rather).  Similarly, we can see that we ought to devote a lot of our remaining garden space to tomatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, and greens.  Of course, were going to grow a larger variety of veggies than that, but the quantities we tend to eat (and would need to find storage space for) are instructive.  And honestly, well probably try to grow more winter squash, green beans, and peppers than the chart suggests.

On a similar note, if we want to keep on our current diet, well need to grow another batch of chickens and catch one large deer and a quarter of a pig. (Or raise one deer and catch a flock of wild chickens.  But we dont have space to raise both!)

All things considered, its a pretty balanced diet, not too far from Harvards Healthy Eating Plate.  Were a little heavier on the veggies, but hey!  Maybe well end up being a very localized blue zone.

Its important to keep in mind that these numbers are just guidelines; were not locking ourselves into a whole year of rigidly following recipes.  We substitute veggies and meats in and out of a recipe like a Wall Street bankster swaps stocks (although we hope none of our meals would be considered subprime or toxic assets).  But its nice to have a set of go-to dishes we can pick from and toss together from stuff in the fridge or pantry if weve already spent our creative energy for the day and still need to make supper.  Whatchagotamology at its finest!

We wont vouch for the user friendliness of the spreadsheet, but if you want to play around with it, you can download it here.  Suggestions welcome!


Do you make meal plans?  Whats your planning strategy?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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