The Market Is NOT Open!

Good morning!

I wanted to send a quick word out to all our members and remind you that we will not have market this Saturday (October 10th). We had a great market yesterday with fall produce including greens and pumpkins. Down payments are available for turkeys, and fall pork is ready to be ordered. I hope all of you have a wonderful weekend and enjoy the festivities.

Sincerely,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager

Weblog Entry

Good Evening,

I failed to mention this past Sunday that the market also has new pumpkin listings. If that doesn’t make you want to make a pile of leaves and jump into them, then maybe the assorted acorn and butternut combos will do it.

Make sure you check out our Volunteer Page for openings this week and in the months to come.You can sign up to what best fits your schedule. Thanks!

Remember to finalize your orders before tomorrow at noon.

All the best,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager

ALFN Market Is Open

The first day of fall was a few days ago, and the signs of fall produce are in the market. You can pick up turkey and pig down payments, apples are ready for consumption, and butternuts squashes are in supply. Check out what is new and make your orders; the market is open.

News & Updates

I just found out from previous ALFN leaders that October 10th is CRAZY! Due to the Race for the Cure events in downtown Little Rock, including events held at Christ Church, ALFN will not be able to run a market. Consequently, this will be the last market week until after the event. You may want to stock up on essential items to get through October 10th. In the meantime, enjoy the local events and pink explosion.

The violence in Syria and the resultant mass migration of people attempting access into Europe is a sad narrative from the series on human life. These events are not new to the human saga, but are paradigmatic of the drama of homo sapiens on Earth. Conflict often leads to mass migration. In the past, glacial fields were traversed, menacing mountain ranges crossed, and expansive uncharted seas sailed. Ancient peoples carried a bit of home with them. Most importantly, “home” was carried as seeds in pouches to germinate a similar way of life in the land ahead. Today, refugees cross barbed wire and chain-linked fence with empty pockets. Due to our technological prowess, many researchers are concerned that we could inadvertently permanently cut off our access to home in the form of seeds. Did you know eight years ago, the Norwegian government built a massive seed vault that currently holds over 850,000 types of seeds? The project was envisioned to be the final backup to possible catastrophes that would wipe out seeds such as nuclear war, viral epidemics or meteor impacts. For the first time since inception, a request was made to withdraw seeds. The regional seed bank in Aleppo, Syria has lost some seeds due to the protracted war. The request is illustrative of the effects of conflict and migration.

The proverbial rented U haul on the road is representative of how westerners migrate to new jobs, new possibilities and new hope. We bubble wrap furniture and china, but rarely do we pack seeds. We archive pictures, store postcards, but often forget to carry food systems in our migrating patterns. I don’t think all of us can be farmers, but all of us should think about the seed banks and knowledge banks for food production in our local economies. It isn’t enough to simply rely on seed producers. I believe a local food economy is only as robust as the local networks and established traditions for saving seed. There are local networks in Arkansas working to do this, but I also believe local consumers and growers should cultivate cultures of saving and banking what we germinate. Conflict and migration will continue to be part of our narrative drama. Let’s return to the ancient practice of carrying local food systems with us in our pockets as well as our heads.

Be well,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager

Market Reminder

The past drives us into the inevitable future while we live somewhere in the middle. In all honesty, the present doesn’t exist. Try to identify this present moment, and it will have already slide into the past. We hydroplane up into our future. Farmers live on this glassy edge too. The romaine leaf stands up, robust, alive with chloroplast pumping. The knife’s edge pauses at the stem before plant becomes salad and death cascades a series of effects. Bags are arranged, cold rooms can stretch the present, but ultimately, we quickly arrange the bodies of plants and animals on tables so that our bodies may continue before the present moment escapes us. Life bleeds into life. Here’s to the bodies of others who nurture our own bodies.

Click, order, and be joyful for tomorrow the market closes.

Sincerely,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager

Market Open

Welcome to another week of fresh food! Today’s market has everything from muscadines to kimchi to squash, to greens, to soap, to duck eggs, to honey. Check out what is new this week; the market is open.

News/Update

We had an awesome market day yesterday. Nathan had an interesting AND tasty presentation on juicing. We also caught some great video of our volunteers working for the Super Service Challenge. I will let everyone know once we are ready to upload it for the competition.

I was inspired by Nathan’s workshop and a conversation with one of our volunteers about implementing more mini-events during market Saturday. I’m excited about different ways we can share our knowledge with each other. Look for a future weblog about this subject. I would love to start having more tastings, mini-workshops and other fun mini-show-and-tells during market Saturday. I’ll organize a few avenues for this and get back with all of you. In the meantime, consider ways you could share some of your own expertise!

I had the opportunity this weekend to help with an urban honey harvest. My kids and I had a blast centrifuging the honey, filtering, and bottling the finished product. In the end, we were a happy, sticky mess. Bees are one of those mysterious elements in our world. From thousands of individual bees, self-organization emerges out of seeming chaos. You can see the same self-organization in a school of fish or flock of birds. The individual parts work in synchrony to create honey, defend from predators, or travel as units across aerial paths in the sky. I’ve heard the mathematical models for these self-organized systems are very difficult, but originate within chaos theory. It has always befuddled the curious mind to understand how order emerges from chaos. These natural systems aren’t classical hierarchical systems where the queen decrees commands or the lead bird squawks orders. Yet, discrete chemical traces, body positions, and chaotic stimulus/response mechanisms build order from the bottom.

Of course, human civilization isn’t as good at self-organization. Though we consciously organize, many of our systems can have detrimental effects. The self-organization built off the stimulus/response mechanism of greed can create capitalistic systems that disenfranchise the poor, or degrade the surrounding environment. Such effects aren’t as sweet as the effects of our sister bees’ work. Decades ago, we arrived at a threshold where our societal projects needed conscious design that mimicked natural systems. We still aren’t thinking like bees. However, I can’t help but wonder if ALFN can’t become more bee-like as we evolve. How can we continue to self-organize a local food economy from the bottom. What stimulus/response pathways, traditions, and values can we use to build a sustainable food system? There are many avenues of thought to follow, but it starts not with the queen, but with the thousands of worker bees making choices that determine ecological sustainability—survival. Call it eco-design or bee-thinking. Whatever we call it, the process begins at the bottom with members.

Let the bee stay in your bonnet and have a sweet week.

Sincerely,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager

Market Reminder

Good afternoon ALFN peeps,

Remember to finalize your orders before tomorrow at noon. I’m needing two more volunteers for this Saturday. Please sign up on Volunteer Spot if you can help.

This Saturday will be a hopping market day. Nathan will be conducting a juicing workshop at 11:00, AND we will be catching some video footage for the Super Service Challenge. Check out this one minute video to see how it works. The basic gist: make a video showing volunteers working in a non-profit (ALFN), enter the video in the competition, then use social media to get folks to vote for the video and add extra entries into the give away.

Come have some fun, order good food, and let’s juice up this food network party.

Cheers,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager

Market is Open

Greetings ALFN members,

I just opened the gates to a fresh paddock of produce; the market is open!

News/Updates

Check out Kellogg Valley Farm this week. They have new fall listings including greens and gourds!!

I’m excited to invite all of you to next week’s market day. Nathan Crabtree is a member of ALFN and expert juicer. He will be conducting a free, informal workshop during market hours this Saturday. The whole workshop will probably last about an hour. Nathan will discuss the methods for juicing as well as the machine used. He will also show how to develop recipes with a scale. The workshop will begin at 11:00 during market hours. Come pick up your produce and hang out for an hour with Nathan. I believe taste tests will be included! Why not purchase some fruit and greens with the intention of experimenting on your own after the workshop!

Living with the Wild

“Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders . . . Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise that live by voices inaudible to you.” (Macfarlane, The Wild Places)

Early yesterday morning, I pulled out of my alley while it was still dark. As I drove up the hill and briefly stopped at a neighborhood intersection, the headlights of my car illuminated a raccoon foraging for food. I wanted to roll down my window and give him a good cussing. But even for a raccoon, I thought this would be too rude. You see, I had suspected the presence of a predator on our darkened streets. A few months ago, I lost a chicken in the night. I say lost not to say disappeared, but dismembered and consumed. Raccoons are highly adaptable creatures due to their intelligence and omnivorous appetite. They have always had a role in evoking the nostalgic era of childhood through stories such as Sterling North’s “Rascal,” and Wilson Rawls’s “Where the Red Fern Grows.” Today, raccoons are a dominant presence not just in the boyhood river bottoms of the countryside, but in urban sprawl. Population densities in America can range from 333 to 67 per/square kilometer, and their success has also raised concern over illnesses such as rabies while conservationists worry about the impact of raccoons on endangered species. In Europe, the raccoon is considered an invasive species.

I find the concept of “invasive species” and our emotional and behavior response to these species an educational window into how modern civilization lives with the wild. Often, we prefer to keep the wild out of our lived spaces, and even then, we prefer a wild that is more picturesque and aesthetic. However, invasive species are successful organisms that have filled ecological niches in the world we have created. The replacement of field to asphalt is a profound habitat shift that upsets ecological systems and individuals within those systems. A monoculture of corn is also a massive habitat disturbance. When such a disturbance occurs, predators and prey reassemble to fit the new habitat. In other words, my neighborhood raccoon is part of the urban ecosystem; blight or insect population explosion in a mono-cropped field is part of a modern agricultural ecosystem.

Whether we attempt to destroy invasives with pesticides (believe it or not, conservation efforts often use certain herbicides to control invasives) or exterminate/remove them from our controlled habitats, the modern reaction to invasive species is indicative of our own inability to live with the wild world. I’m not suggesting we feed urban raccoons or protect potato beetles. However, I would suggest we consider their presence to be an ecological response to habitat disturbance that is usually rooted in human behavior. To me, we have to shift our thinking. Instead of bifurcating the world into good and bad species, we need to think ecologically. Our farming and our thinking need to mimic the workings of Mother Nature. I disturb the soil and poison ivy emerges. Instead of reaching for glyphosate, I find other species to fill the niche I created when I disturbed the soil. Every action has a reaction in the natural world. In the end, growing food or raising chickens or driving to work involve living with the wild world around us. Consequently, we must always be in conversation with this wild to not only live sustainably, but keep ourselves from becoming the ultimate invasive species.

Wildly Yours,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager

Market Reminder

I’ve got the cyber-window propped open, and the aromas of food continue to waft out of the market. However, hurry and finalize your orders before the rains come, and I close the window Wednesday at noon.

Update/News

1. We still need three volunteers for this Saturday. If you can come, sign up at Volunteer Spot.

2. Crimmins updated their grower page to inform everyone of their fall grow plan. For those of you who plan in advance, you will want to see what they will be offering in a couple of months.

3. Make sure you check out the new and featured products. There are still plenty of apples, peaches, Beauregard sweet potatoes, essential oils, coffee and green eggs. Add some ham and have a Dr. Seuss dinner.

Enjoy the fruitiblation,
With the smack-lipped slurp of fuzzle-peach wonkacks
to the spicy salacious salsas bursting with hot reverberation.

On the ALFN market, you can find just about anything your sniffler can snuff out.
Why there are apple-doodles and spinach-green teethers with a vitamin snout.
There are anti-McDonnies and tubers the color of rainbow trout.

But no matter what your taste,
Don’t waste, but haste

For the hour will ding-dong,
And the time will be gone
And you will be left without a carrot or song.

Snorkakely,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager

The Market is Open

Happy Labor Day Weekend! The market is open!

We will have a thorough update later this week.

Rest well,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager

Market Reminder

Afternoon Folks,

Remember to finish your orders before the market closes tomorrow at noon.

News/Updates

I need one more volunteer for the Saturday late shift. You can sign up here: Volunteer Spot.

Also, if you have extra plastic or paper sacks at your house, please bring them this Saturday. We are low on sacks for groceries.

I’m pleased to announce Amy Pritchard has courageously stepped up to the Governance Chair and plopped down with vigor and optimism. May our board meetings be charged with orderly conversation and creativity. Welcome Amy, and thank you for joining!

Don’t forget there will be fresh roasted coffee and other goodies for those who stretch their necks into the future and plan their eating escapades.

Rest well,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager