Mule Days with Tim and Alice Mills

It’s 5pm on Saturday October 13^th and I just got home from a lovely day with Tim and Alice Mills. I had called to schedule a time to interview them and they told me they were going to Mule Days in the town of Washington on Saturday morning and invited me to attend. It seemed like a good way to spend the day.

We met at their house at 9:30 that morning and had to wait a few minutes for their daughter Rebekah and son-in-law Brian and granddaughter Emma to get there. They had stopped at Burger King on the way over.

Tim was dressed in his characteristic coveralls and a plaid shirt. Before we stepped out Alice told Tim he needed to put his hearing aids in. Tim has a hard time hearing even with his hearing aids. We piled in Alice’s white Cadillac, which is the first authentic farmer Cadillac I’ve encountered, and Bryan and Rebekah followed behind in their Chevrolet Avalanche.

Washington is in Wilkes County so we drove through Winterville on our way over to 72 then took 72 through Crawford and Lexington and on for another 24 miles or so. On the drive over we talked a lot about the drought and how it had affected things. Tim and Alice have a 140 foot well that they water from, only the ground has shifted and lodge a solid rock into the shaft at about 40 feet. There’s still water at 40 feet but Tim talked about his idea to fire a rifle down the shaft to try and break up that rock. Their loyal and somewhat slow farm hand Paul is super excited about this idea.

Tim, Alice and Paul spent yesterday afternoon fishing up at the Jubilee Lakes and didn’t have any luck. I told them how all the refugees fish everything they can out of the lake and put the whole fish in the freezer, then take the fish with them when they leave for Atlanta. Tim mentioned he wanted to catch a turtle when he realized all the fish were pretty much gone. This got us talking about turtle stew which I’ve never had. I mentioned that it seemed they would be tough. The trick to making good turtle according to Tim is to feed them corn meal for about 2-3 weeks before killing them to clean them out of all the weird things they like to eat.

This got us talking about feeding corn, and how I’d noticed that the supermarkets were advertising “All grain-fed” beef like that was a good thing or something. This conversation was interesting as Tim’s familiarity with the Bible had led him to believe that “fattening” the calf was a biblical instruction from God, that there was nothing wrong with that. We talked about how ruminant stomachs respond to grain and the problems with strains of e-coli that can now be passed from a cow to a human due to the acidic stomach of a cow from eating grain.

The Mule Day was a popular event with cars lined up at the entrance. There was a show ring and a mule drawn plough demo on one side and food and vendors on the other. The event was staged at the Callaway House historic preservation center, a great little locale with a beautiful, stately plantation style home with pillars and big front porch and one of the tallest, thickest southern magnolias I’ve ever seen. It was probably four feet across. They had reconstructed an 1889 one room schoolhouse as well. There was a sorghum mill and they were cooking up the sorghum syrup. This was neat to watch. There was brick fireplace, built of two long walls on top of which they sat a long iron flume. The sorghum syrup was moved from one section of the flume to the other depending on how long it had been cooking. As it was cooking a bright green film of chloroplast coagulated on the surface and was skimmed off. At the farthest end the syrup began to simmer and gain its characteristic dark color.

One of the things I enjoy the most from these type events it the opportunity to learn a few new terms. Of course, sometimes I have to relearn some old terms. The purpose of the event was to celebrate the mule and a mule simply put is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. It’s an F1 hyrbrid so to speak, and usually unable to reproduce. Before we left the house, Tim had explained that one of the advantages of the mule is that they will eat of lot of things that a horse will turn their nose up at. They seem to be hardier in that regard and not as prone to problems such as foundering. There are all types of mules, and as they moved about the show ring the judge explained a little about the cotton mule which was narrower and able to do delicate field work.

There were wagon rides, and tons of food. We walked over for lunch. I had a rib plate and enjoyed gnawing on the bones under the shade of a pine, wiping my face with white bread, interspersed with bites of beans and potato salad. Tim generously offered a delicious brownie with giant chunks of chocolate embedded. I also picked up a couple of three dollar pieces of pottery for Christmas presents.

On the way home I learned a little more about Tim and Alice’s history. They talked about their rodeo days, how every weekend for about 2-3 years they would travel to a rodeo where Tim would often ride the bulls.

They had moved to Athens about 25 or 30 years ago coming from North Carolina where they both had family. Tim got a job on a feedlot owned by a man named Miller, and as part of the deal he provided them with a free place to live. It wasn’t much to look at they said, but they arrived in June and enjoyed fixing it up, adding carpets to cover nearly rotten floorboards and building kitchen shelves. Rebekah was five years old at the time.

When I first asked where they had lived when they arrived in Athens, Alice answered, “The Loveshack.” Anyone who has been in Athens for very long knows that this was where the band the B-52’s lived and wrote many of their early songs, and eventually memorialized the shack with one of their most popular songs. Alice said that the band actually came by one day wanting to visit their old stomping grounds and she and Rebekah got to spend the day with them.

Tim was working on a piece of equipment inside the silage silo and got silage sickness, which can affect you if you breathe the fumes coming up out of the fermenting silage. The gas produced is nitrogen dioxide and kills people every year during the process of filling and maintaining silos. Tim went to the doctor and was told he had two choices. He could take one week of bed rest or he could go the hospital. Well the Mills had no health insurance, so bed rest seemed the way to go. Tim’s boss, Mr. Miller was a hard man and told him he could have the afternoon off but he expected him to be back the next day. Tim said that was not going to work. They spoke the next day and Mr. Miller told him to be back that day. No matter how many times Tim tried to explain to him how serious this was, they had reached an impasse. Tim did carpentry jobs for several months and the family moved into the trailer of a man and his daughter about Rebekah’s age. It worked for a short time but Tim and Alice knew they needed something of their own. They sold the house they had built in North Carolina and bought the little yellow house on Harve Mathis road.

The Mill Farm Brunch

The Mills Farm Brunch was one of the shining moments of last month. It's been nearly one month ago now on Sept. 9th, but well worth going back to take a look at it. The event was a fundraiser for the Classic City Chefs & Cooks Association, the local chapter of the American Culinary Federation.

Tim and Alice Mills are two of my favorite people in all of Athens. They add a soul to our local foods scene that just makes me smile every time I think about them. I'll do a whole write up about them at some point but this entry is going to focus on the food we had at brunch.

You'll notice we just got a taste of everything, but it was perfect. Almost like a Tapas style brunch. Here's the menu....and the recipes.

Red Mule Polenta with Goat Cheese, Poached Egg, Truffled Hollandaise and Shaved Country Ham

Polenta:

1 cup Red Mule Polenta
2 cups chicken stock
1 tablespoon whole butter
1/4 cup heavy cream
4 ounces Sweet Grass Dairy goat cheese
Salt and pepper to taste

Poached Egg:

4 whole eggs
1/2 gallon water
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon tarragon vinegar

Truffled Hollandaise:

4 egg yolks
Juice of 1/2 lemon
dash Chalula hot sauce
2 ounces water
8 ounces warm melted butter
Salt and white pepper to taste
1 teaspoon white truffle oil

For the polenta: In a sauce pan, bring stock to a simmer. Add polenta and stir for 2 minutes. Add butter and cream and cook for 5 minutes. Season to taste and reserve.

For the poached egg: In another sauce pan, bring water to a simmer. Add salt and vinegar. Crack each egg into a small cup and gently place in water. Poach until firm and reserve.

For the hollandaise: Over a double boiler, place a bowl with eggs, lemon juice, water, and hot sauce, whisking until eggs are 150 degrees and form ribbons. Do not scramble. Pull from heat. Whisk in butter and truffle oil.

To serve: On serving dishes, divide the polenta. Place one poached egg atop each dish of polenta. Top with Truffled Hollandaise Sauce and garnish with thinly shaved country ham.

Note: You can shock eggs in ice water and reserve in the refrigerator for use later that day.

- Recipe from Athens Country Club Executive Chef Christopher McCook, CEC

Saffron Infused Double Cream Vermont White Cheddar Red Mule Grits with Dry Rubbed Hickory Smoked Pork and Butter Bean Tomato Chow Chow

Grits:

2 teaspoons Saffron threads
6 cups chicken stock
6 cups heavy cream
2 teaspoons Kosher salt
2 teaspoons Coarse ground black pepper
8 ounces butter
2 cups Red Mule Grits
16 ounces cheddar, shredded

Smoked pork:

8 pounds Boston butt pork roast
1 cup JMCC dry rub
3 pounds hickory chips
10 pounds charcoal
12 ounces beer

Chow Chow:

1/2 cup yellow onions, finely diced
8 ounces cabbage, finely diced
8 ounces butter beans, cooked
1/2 ounce salt
1 cup rice wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon ginger
16 ounces green tomatoes, finely diced
4 ounces carrots, finely diced
4 ounces celery, finely diced
6 ounces sugar
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

For the grits: Add saffron to chicken stock. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Strain stock. Add cream, salt and pepper and butter bring to a slow boil. Add grits, whisking. Cook, stirring, for approximately 20 minutes. Add cheese and allow to melt. Makes 8 servings.

For the pork: Place chips in hot water and soak overnight. Rub pork with dry rub and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate overnight. Light charcoal burn until gray and ashen (in a grill with a lid). Drain chips and spread over coals. Unwrap pork and place on a rack 12 to 18 inches above the chips. Cover and let smoke until wood chips are exhausted. Pull pork from grill, place in an ovenproof dish on a rack, add beer and cover. Place in a 300-degree oven for 4 hours. Remove from oven, trim fat and chop or shred meat. Add barbecue sauce to meat if you desire. Makes 20 4-ounce portions.

For the chow chow: Combine all ingredients in a non reactive pan bring to one boil, reduce heat to simmer and cook for 30 minutes. Cool and store refrigerated. Should be served with this recipe at room temperature. Makes 30 2-ounce portions.

- Recipe from Jennings Mill Country Club Executive Chef Lance Jeffers

Fried Griddlecakes with Country Sausage, Green Tomato Jam and Cane syrup

Griddlecakes:

3 cups Red Mule cornmeal
3/4 teaspoon of salt
6 teaspoons baking powder
Dash cinnamon powder
6 eggs
3 tablespoons of melted bacon fat
2 1/2 to 3 cups milk (at room temperature)

Green Tomato Jam:

3 pounds green tomatoes cut into 1/2 inch pieces
1 lemon
1 orange
3 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt

Sausage patties

For the griddlecakes: Mix all of the dry ingredients together well. Add the eggs and continue mixing. Slowly add the milk until the batter reaches a pourable consistency. You may not need all of the milk. Add the melted bacon fat into the batter and continue stirring until well incorporated.

Spoon mixture into a well-seasoned pre-heated cast iron skillet and cook on one side until it begins to form an edge and is bubbling inside. Carefully turn and continue cooking until done.

For the green tomato jam: Place the tomatoes in a heavy bottom saucepot and cover with the salt and the sugar. Let them sit overnight. Take the zest off the orange and the lemon, using a zester; save this and reserve the juice. The next day stir the tomatoes and place over a low burner. Add the cinnamon. Add the juice and zest and cook slowly until tomatoes become fairly soft and the mixture thickens. Store in the refrigerator.

For the country sausage: Fry the sausage patties in a hot skillet, turning frequently until they reach an internal temperature of at least 165 degrees.

To serve: Place cooked griddlecake on plate, arrange sausage patty on top of cake, spoon green tomato jam on top, and lightly drizzle with cane syrup.

- Recipe from Athens Country Club Sous Chef Chris Borden

Girl Ponders Mule.

I took a lot of pictures of Tim's mule Luke who grinds all the corn into the grits, polenta and cornmeal pictured above. Luke's the hardest working member of the family. I like this picture of a girl staring deep into Luke's soul.

Field of Greens

This morning I headed on over to Andy and Hilda Byrd's 2nd Annual Field of Greens fundraiser. They call it the "Organic Farm Aid" and have a good ole farm, food and music get-together with over 500 people with all proceeds going to benefit Georgia Organics.

Some of my closest farm friends were in attendance and its always good to meet new people at these type events. Its a tight knit community and one with great rewards. My camera only retained battery power for about 30 minutes so I was limited in my abilities to capture all the terrific goings-on.


This was Michael McMullen's daughter who had her own table where she was selling pokeberry seeds. She was incredibly articulate in describing for potential customers the medicinal benefits of pokeberry. Her beaming father stood nearby and commented after her eloquent delivery, "The benefits of home-schooling."



This is a goat. Aren't goats great?


This is an okra blossom. Pretty huh?


This is Tim Mills. One of my favorite people on earth. On the table there is his corn meal, polenta, and grits which he grinds with the help of mule named Luke.

A Day with the Dairymen of Georgia

Little did I know that Georgia's second biggest dairy region was only about 35 minutes south of Athens.

Morgan and Putnam Counties are north Georgia's last dairy counties. Today I was part of a meeting hosted by University of Georgia extension on helping dairy operators develop environmental management plans for their farms.

It was nice rainy morning, the kind that looks just like Portland, OR weather from the inside of a van, but once you took one step outside and were enveloped with the heat and humidity you realized we're still in the south and its still August. Myself and two UGA faculty took some remote, winding and quite pretty roads around the top end of Lake Oconee, passing through Greshamville, on our way to Buckhead. No, not the Buckhead in Atlanta. This is Buckhead of Morgan County. The two are just a little bit different.

We took a left at the bait shop and another left at the fillin' station and pulled into Bonner's Buffet Restaurant where the Georgia Dairy Association has its meetings every month.

We had our meeting. It was a tough sell to encourage these busy farmers of the utility of taking time from their busy schedules to develop an environmental management system (EMS) for their farm. It was a fairly new approach to addressing environmental issues, and its success rate hadn't yet been proven. At least not on farms. EMS's were originally conceived for industry as a way to be proactive, make continuous incremental improvements, stay ahead of regulation, and ultimately cut costs. Cutting costs had been successful for industry through implementation of an EMS. Thus far the EMS strategy on farms hadn't shown that many cost benefits.

There were some good questions from the audience. One observation made was that perhaps farms implementing EMS hadn't seen cost savings because farmers are already having to be as efficient as possible just to survive. The audience felt like there was some validity to this point.

The group performed an exercise where they went through a list of environmental management concerns on their farm and they ranked how important each one was. They performed this ranking for themselves as the owner/operator, but also how important these topics were to regulators, to neighbors and to environmental groups. The topics were on everything from nitrate pollution of groundwater, to erosion, to dust and odors, and wildlife habitat. They also decided to add water use to the list. It was interesting and maybe just a little surprising that they consistently voted themselves as having the highest concern on most topics. The group was really engaged at this point. Some of them recognized that they were very concerned about these issues and probably hadn't given adequate reflection on management opportunities on their farm.


After the talk it was time for lunch. Fried catfish, fried chicken, barbeque, french fries, hush puppies, slaw, watermelon and cherry cobbler. I went back for seconds and thirds and had about 4 glasses of iced tea. Over lunch I asked if they drank their own milk on the farm. To my surprise they said no, they bought milk in the store like everybody else. The fella sitting next to me said that when his father was still around they used to pick one cow out of the herd that they would hand milk for themselves. She was chosen for two reasons. She always showed the lowest bacteria count in her milk and she was nice and easy to milk. The only problem, it slowed up the line when she came into the parlor to be hand milked. He said they don't do that anymore. Both the fellas I was chatting with added that people come by the farm sometimes and ask to buy unpasteurized milk out of the tank. They'll always say, "We'll pay you." And these guys always respond, "I don't care. I can't sell you that milk." Unpastuerized is illegal to sell in Georgia and there would be stiff penalties.

The extension agent who was sitting with us added that recently some folks got sick who were drinking raw milk that was being sold as pet food (one method farmers have used to sell raw milk). I wanted to know more about their personal tastes and distinctions for milk from the farm vs. the grocery store, but I got the impression they didn't really think that way. They were interested in my visit to Russel Johnson's farm and his plans to build a bottling facility and selling his milk direct to grocery stores.


During my final conversations on the front porch this little stray kitten kept climbing up my leg clear up to my belt. That cat had more personality than most any cat I've seen. Would've made a good farm cat. If only I had a farm.

Week of the Chicken!

Bright and early Monday morning of this week I giddily awoke, made a cup of coffee, put on a dark black t-shirt (the one with NY's jazz club the Village Vanguard on the front), jumped in my car and drove toward the glowing orange sun. I also had on pants!

It was about 6:45 in the A.M. and today was chicken slaughtering day. I feel fairly confident that I was one of only 4 other people in the Greater Athens area that were going to be slaughtering, scalding, plucking, eviscerating, chilling and then packing 100 chickens under God's blue sky.

For the last 8 weeks two small square pens, approximately 10x10 constructed of wood, chicken wire and a tarp had been holding 50 chickens each as they were moved once per day across a pasture beneath a palonia orchard. These chickens and these pens, undneath these trees, on this grass, on this farm, in this day in age offers more hope, knowledge, and wisdom than may be evident upon first glance.

Chickens haven't been treated very well by humans over the last 30-40 years or so. What I mean by that is imagine spending your entire life at a Rolling Stones concert, standing room only, shoulder to shoulder, in a windowless stadium, all the bathrooms are closed, and the band never shows up. That's kind of what life is like for a factory chicken.

Having spent some time in these chicken factories, I've never met a farmer who loves what they are doing. As many people have pointed out, it doesn't really resemble farming. When you walk in, you are smacked in the face by the heavy smell of ammonia. There are no windows so the 50x500 foot house is dimly lit (just about all day to keep the chickens eating 24x7). There are 30,000 chickens, and your job is to pick up the ones that have died, and make sure the automatic waterers, feeders, and temperature monitors are working. Getting a kid to go into one of those things day after day can't be easy.

With pastured poultry, a farmer is outside. The chickens have all the fresh air and sunlight they could want. They are moved each day onto fresh grass which they happily munch on, and pick through the soil looking for bugs. Each day they lay down a fresh layer of manure to help fertilize the pasture, which helps the grass grow for the cattle that will be following behind. They don't have to spend a single day in yesterday's excrement. It's fresh, clean and sanitary.

Now in the end the chicken does still get killed and eaten. Such is the price paid by a domestic fowl in an omnivorous world. But the important question is, did the animal live a good, tranquil, healthy life? Was the animal under intense stress? Was it deprived of its "unalienable rights" of fresh air, grass, bugs, ability and room to move around, freedom from one's own feces, and sunshine. No. By all accounts these birds have been happy!

Our crew of 3 were excited. This was the inaugural day of chicken slaughter on this particular farm. The very first batch. There was never going to be another first time, and I wanted to be a part of the ceremonial celebration of the good lives these chickens had led, and the unique nourishment they would afford to a whole mass of people.

Set up began promptly at 7AM. There were cutting tables to wash down, kill cones to set up, a turkey fryer would serve as our scalding pot. A brand new feather master would pluck the feathers. Then there was a tray for catching the blood beneath the cones, and a garbage can for the eviscera, and another tub for offal (the feathers). We had sharp knives, and matches, and a pulley system for dipping the birds in the scalder. It was all set up in stations. After about an hour of getting things together, we were anxious to try it out.

The birds were taken from their pen out in the pasture and put into a pen on the back of a pickup. Each bird was then stuck into an upside down traffic cone which was affixed to 2x4 across two trees. The top of the cones had been cut off so that the birds head was sticking out of the bottom. In such a position the birds can't move their wings and get very still and quiet. The most difficult part of the operation is the kill itself. It's done by simple grabbing the birds head and cutting their main artery on the side of its neck. This may be the hardest part of the procedure because the bird's don't die instantly. Cutting their artery allows the heart to continue to beat removing the blood from the body which can leave a bad taste to the meat.

Once bled, each bird (now dead) is removed from the cone, and it's fit put into a pulley situated over a vat of hot water at 145 degrees. The bird is then dipped / submerged into the hot water repeatedly for 1 minute. This loosens the birds feathers for plucking. Rather than hand plucking, they are placed into an apparatus that resembles a large salad spinner with little rubber fingers with grooves in each finger that grasp and remove the feathers as the bird is spun around and around. As they spin around a mist of water continues to clean the bird.

Once the feathers have been removed, the birds now are starting to look like food. They are placed on the cutting table and the head is simply pulled off. The feet are removed at the joint, leaving the end to your drumstick handle. The oil gland above their tail is cut off, then a cut is made at the neck to seperate the esophogus and the crop. To eviscerate a small sideways cut is made above the anus (or the "vent" is a nicer way to put it). Enlarge the opening and then scoop out the organs in a scooping motion. The trick is not to break the intestines or especially the gall bladder (a bright blueish green organ that secretes bile to the liver). The lungs kind of cling to the rib cage and have to scraped out, then the anus is cut out, and a hose is used to wash to wash the body cavity clean. That's it. Throw it in a tub of ice water to cool the body down and it's time to go home and eat chicken.

I spent about 5 hours on the farm that morning with my other excited co-horts. I stopped at one point to exclaim, "This is fun!" And it was. My real job was expecting me so before we finished all 100 birds (we were over half way there) I had to head off.

It was about noon and as I drove back into Athens I felt like an adventure. There was a fresh whole chicken in a ziploc bag on the seat next to me. I went in my apartment and threw the bird in the fridge while I took a quick shower to rinse the smell of chicken fat from my skin. I put on clean clothes, grabbed my laptop, jumped on my bike and headed towards campus. As I looked around at people walking down the sidewalk I thought how lucky I'd been to have spent the morning on a farm just out of town contributing to the cycle of life. It was Monday and it had officially become the Week of Chicken.

The first day I had Thai Peanut Sauce stir fry chicken breasts and tenderloin with bok choy, brocolli, onions and garlic. The remainder of that meal I had for lunch today. Day two was baked Jamaican jerk chicken legs cut into slices and put on a sandwich of locally baked sourdough bread, and some organic lettuce from California probably, a little Grey Poupon and Mayonaisse. Third night I used what was left to make my mother's famous chicken casserole. You're going to pass out when you hear the ingredients. One can cream of chicken soup, 8 oz sour cream, 3 breasts of chicken, butter the dish, crush one whole pack of Ritz crackers on top, drizzle butter on the crackers. I can't believe I didn't die of heart disease eating that way growing up. But it's delicious and this week is the first time I've ever made it myself. The family recipe is alive and well.

The only way I can get closer to my food now is to get my own farm. The temptation is growing.

Till next time,
Justin

The Blessing of Food

One of my best friends made a dramatic decision a few years ago just shortly after a very brief stint working for the Howard Dean presidential campaign. For reasons unknown and mysterious to me, he decided to become a farmer.

My friend had always been a bit unconventional, which is probably apparent considering his devotion for Howard Dean, but he’d obtained a bachelor’s degree from a very respected liberal arts college and shortly thereafter landed a job as Executive Director of a small non-profit tasked to defend a very grand resource; the Coosa River Watershed. The job followed a canoe trip he had completed of the entire Coosa / Alabama River system, a voyage lasting three months beginning in the mountains of Georgia and ending in the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile Bay, Alabama. Our friendship was born of our mutual passion for rivers, and most of our get-togethers involved paddling, fishing, hiking and camping adventures all across north Georgia.

One of the great pleasures of making friends with eclectic and determined individuals is the opportunity to watch them as they travel down winding and enriching new paths in life. He called me after returning from Iowa and a thoroughly disappointing experience on the campaign trail and informed me that he was going to start farming. After one year of intense training, living and working with a farm family in the hill country north of Asheville, North Carolina, he returned to Georgia and worked out a deal to set to work on a piece of river bottom land near Ranger. What followed was nothing short of miraculous.

For the first four months he lived in a tent underneath a tarp, cluttered about with all his earthly belongings. He had a phone line, and he’d convinced the power company to install a meter so he’d have power, even though there was no house associated with it. Other than that there was nothing but bare ground, a vision, and a whole heap of work. Many hands make light work, and my friend had a knack with people. He’d maintained close ties with his college community and as a result was rarely alone on his little patch of soil. If you dropped by for a visit, he’d have a job waiting for you.

Within just one year the farm was cultivating fruits and vegetables on about three to four acres. He’d invested in a tractor and a beat up pickup, erected a 100 foot hoop house, a seedling greenhouse, and with a lot of help from friends had constructed a pole barn house roughly 30 by 40 foot and 16 feet high with a tin roof. The fact that he had built a house in a matter of a few months impressed me the most. The design was unconventional, but practical and inexpensive. He’d put in subflooring with insulation underneath, and heated the home using a wood burning stove set dead center with the pipe going straight through the tin roof.

His most ingenious idea was constructing the walls of the barn out of inexpensive vinyl billboard sheets. Billboard advertisements are printed on heavyweight, weatherproof, vinyl sheets. He was able to purchase two of these for a couple hundred dollars and fasten them as his walls. When sitting inside the house one of the walls featured a floor to ceiling picture of a Shoney’s Big Boy hamburger and another wall featured a Chrysler 300 sedan. There was no indoor plumbing but there was a wash basin with a bucket underneath. Hot water had to be heated atop the wood burning stove. There were two bedrooms which were actually 8x10 foot lofts sitting above my friend’s library/office on one side and living room on the other. He had an internet connection, and a television, VCR, and stereo. It was one of the coziest, cutest little homes I’ve ever been in, and it was a happy place.

My visits to the farm had a deeper impact on me than I realized at the time. One of the first things I noticed was that the foods my friend was eating were a lot different from the foods I typically ate. The breads and cereals were always whole grain, and often fresh. I remember thinking that the flavors were a lot more complex, I wasn’t sure that I liked them at first, but I could certainly tell that there was a density to these foods that I didn’t feel when eating white bread. Most of the folks on the farm were crazy about salads, and I was exposed to a world of greens I never knew existed. A lot of thought went into the food eaten on the farm. One of my more exciting visits occurred a few weeks after I had hit a small deer on the highway, taken it home and cleaned and dressed it, then carried some of the hams to the farm to be ground up into hamburger meat. It was fun to swap food and swap stories. A woman who lived nearby would bring her farm fresh eggs and trade for fresh strawberries out of the field and other produce of the week.

One of my first visits after the pole barn had been completed, there were about four of us there including my friend’s girlfriend, and we had all pitched in to prepare this great meal of fresh foods now spread out on the table. We were about to sit down and eat when my friend paused and said, “Let’s bless this food.” It was the first time I’d ever heard him suggest such a thing. The brief prayer that followed will always be a moment that I will remember. In a short period of time farming had affected a deep change in my friend’s life. His generous spirit, his strength, his humility, his calm all came into focus in his life as a farmer. I felt so happy for him, so proud of him, and so inspired by his example. Little did I know that moments like this would ultimately penetrate and influence the course of my own life just as deeply.

As his words of thanks put a blessing on the meal, the moment allowed each of us to reflect on the importance of our simply being together and sharing in good work and good food and good company. I’ve thought a lot about why that blessing, that meal, in that house, with those friends was so poignant to me. Since then I’ve sought the occasion to bless a meal. It’s a practice I fail to do everyday, but in the seeking I’ve opened a whole new world of meaning and relationship with the people who daily cooperate with the earth so that the rest of us can have something to eat.

Here we go Again!

Hello folks.

I'm back. So after a gentle respite from writing I have decided it is time once again to force the issue by committing to a blog format. I have learned that you write more when people expect you to write.

Beginning in April and ending in November I wrote extensively about a cross country cycling adveneture to discover America's Farms. You can find that Blog at www.farmlandconservation.org. That experience has led me onwards to a whole new world of exciting challenges and experiences with farm policy, local Georgia farms, opportunities in sustainable agriculture.

I have learned from my prior writing experience that you simply cannot retain nor make sense of your experiences unless you are capturing them along the way, all the little quotes that people say, your impressions at the time. They make a huge impact on the value of those stories. Well I don't won't to allow any more of them to be lost than already have so I'm going to begin sharing them again here.

This is just the warm-up. I'm a little out of practice already but I'll be back up to speed soon.

Thanks for coming back.