This Means There Is Such A Thing As Hudson Valley Vodka

The fifth and final farm-related event I attended this semester was the Farm Bill Hackathon put on by Food and Tech Connect. It was a full day of working on projects related to information technology and the farm bill, listening to presentations and mingling.

This was an event done well and made me hopeful for the potential for hackathon-type events. There were multiple non-profits there with specific projects to pitch at the beginning of the day and although people did come and go throughout the event, there was still a full house at the end of the day when each group gave presentations. 

The food provided was great and best of all the event was FREE. Expensive conferences are disheartening and certainly limit who can attend. I'm not sure how much of the food, drinks and the space were donated or purchased, but all parties involved were taking this opportunity to promote themselves. In Syracuse I felt like I was pulling teeth to get people to just show up, let alone purchasing food and getting the space. Here people wanted to participate.

I worked on a project for the Glynwood Institute's Apple Exchange. This is a group of Hudson Valley orchardists (and distillers) that are moving into value added products like cider, hard cider and apple liquors as a new business model. Value added products are a new market that can be more profitable than just apples. I suspect this has something to do with alcoholic products being much less likely to spoil and being an efficient way to use ugly apples.

These orchardists wanted to have a way to collaborate online to exchange information about cider and liquor production. Their requirements were that it needed to be private, have discussion threads and be able to share pictures and documents. This group is made up of people who range in age from their late twenties through their sixties. They all use email, but beyond that there is a wide range of tech savvy-ness. This platform needed to be easy for people who do not spend all day on the computer to use. These farmers also operate on tight budgets -- our final product needed to be free.

My fellow team members, Amir and Oana, and I spent a whole bunch of time fiddling with different products available online and discussing the specific needs of this group with Sara Grady and Judy LaBelle. Our final product was an online forum that includes a Google Group, Google Docs and Flickr accounts.
The Google group will be the central hub with links to Flicker and Google Docs. All of these parts were linked together and instructions with explanations provided. 

We presented our functional, but inelegant project to everyone there without a visual because Google Groups is not very pretty. Afterwards, a software developer was kind enough to introduce himself and explain to me that Open Atrium fit all of our requirements in one neat package. Oh well.

Although I already knew this about myself, this event made it even more clear that I am not particularly tech-savvy myself. I seemed like everyone else at the conference had their super-fancy macs and iphones going simultaneously and were tweeting as they went. The toshiba laptop I plunked down on the table was a high school graduation present and stood out.

Information technology has created some wonderful tools for communication, but I question how appropriate they are for farms and food. Glynwood also threw out the idea of creating an app for people to get information about orchards as they were driving around the Hudson Valley, but I know that outside of the villages and towns cell phone service is pretty shoddy in Ulster County. I'm sure it only gets worse the farther you are from the City. We ended up leaving that idea alone and only working on the collaboration forum.

The event was hosted by Cookstr which is a fancy recipe search engine that lets you choose from a variety of criteria like ingredients and skill level to find new recipes. But part of cooking is figuring out what a recipe means for yourself, substituting ingredients and estimating amounts. You kind of need to just try it out and see what happens.

Technology has its limits especially for something so tied to the land and hands-on. At the same time, I am in awe of the power these tools provide for communication. 

Be sure to check out the other projects from the hackathon here.

Not getting a BA

My adventures this fall continued with the Exploring Our Regional Food System and the It Takes A Region Conference in October and November. I'm lumping these events together because I feel like they were part of the same lesson for me personally even though the two events were not connected.

Both events took place in Upstate New York (but not the North Country) and were billed as events that addressed the local food systems and agriculture. I thought that this would mean learning about how to produce food in innovative ways and how to get more people eating local food. It ended up being a lot of people from non-profit organizations talking about policy. There were definitely farmers in attendance at both events, but the focus was not on farmers or food. It was on grants, food deserts and telling low income people that they need to eat more vegetables. Their intentions were good and certainly someone needs to handle policy issues in agriculture, but this is not where my interests or expertise lie.

I am fairly certain that I was the only engineer present at either event. The people I met were generally enthusiastic about engineers getting involved in agriculture, but no one had any idea of what to do with me. My assigned mentor at the It Takes A Region Conference asked me if I was getting a BA or my master's. She hadn't even considered that I would be getting a BS -- no one I met had any sort of technical background. They weren't talking about production techniques, pest management or erosion even though I know this is part of every farmer's life.

What they did touch on that I found interesting is that farming on a local scale is always about being a small business. Farms face special challenges because they are capital intensive from the get-go because farmers need land, equipment and infrastructure to put out products with slim profit margins. Farmers also have a very difficult time getting the loans or credit they need for a variety of reasons. I helped with the survey for the National Young Farmers' Coalition report Building A Future With Farmers and they did a fantastic job presenting the difficulties that young and beginning farmers face in these areas. Grow NYC also put out an informative report on this issue called Farmers On The Edge.

Moral of the story: I need to learn more about business and entrepreneurship (specifically farm business) and I will need to look elsewhere for people handling the technical of sustainable agriculture.

Local Living Festival

I gave presentation about Farmhack@ESF at the Local Living Festival in Canton, NY on September 24th. Although I did my best to give an engaging presentation, the audience was probably ten people maximum and not laughing at my jokes. This is definitely an agricultural community, but I think they weren't particularly interested in engineering or design. I also represented ESF in a campus sustainability summit and was under-qualified to discuss my school's plan to be carbon neutral by 2015.

Before this festival, I had been to the North Country twice before, for an all-girls math and science camp in middle school. (giggle now) At the time it had seemed like this isolated place that just might as well be Canada, but that weekend made me reconsider. The people I met were so nice. They went out of their way to welcome me into their community. I arrived with a cold and recieved heaps of mashed potatoes, veggies, greens and hot tea to sooth my congested head and tired bones. Everyone was so genuinely happy to meet me and being helpful was just what you did.

This festival was all about environmental issues, but they were approached in a very different way from downstate. Any policies discussed were very regional and nobody was there to fund raise. It was all very tangible and honest. Assemblywoman Addie Russell mediated the sustainability summit I participated in. She spoke about how the North Country is so isolated that they never feel the economic highs and lows that the rest of the state experiences. This brand of environmentalism was all about self-sufficiency -- local farms, getting off the grid and canning at home. The farmer (Dullie from Birdsfoot) I stayed with held a question and answer session about her farming practices. Only two other people attended and I got to ask her all about crop rotations and soil amendments. She was very forthcoming with information and pointed me in the right direction to learn more.

Initially, I was drawn to urban agriculture because it seemed like that was where agriculture was getting innovative, but now rural life is increasingly more appealing. Local food isn't hip and trendy here, it's part of everyday life. The kind of community built in this kind of geographic isolation is fascinating as someone who grew up in the New York metropolitan area. With the exception of the colleges present, most of the the establishments present were small businesses invested in the local economy. The people of the North Country seemed to be treating each other excellently because they were all so intertwined.

I'm sure winters are rotten and petty gossip exists in the North Country, but what I saw of it was pretty glorious.

Where to Begin?

In the approximately six months since I last posted, I have gotten into all kinds of shenanigans. To the point where I think recapping will require more than one post. I'll start at the beginning of the semester.

I spent a whole bunch of energy early in the semester on Farmhack@ESF. This was a one day conference for farmers and designers to collaborate on solutions for small scale agriculture and part of my internship with the National Young Farmers' Coalition. This event was on September 17th, only three weeks into the semester. Which in many ways was a hassle, but I spent the better part of the summer scheming to make it happen. I learned a whole bunch about planning an event, marketing, getting funding and having the gumption to ask for what you want. I certainly appreciate the press Farmhack@ESF received and it was interesting to write about the event in a number of different contexts. But now this is my blog. The context is me.

For me I am really thankful that my friends from Tantré Farm came all the way from Michigan to participate. That was wonderful, you all contributed so much. My Mom and Dad were a fantastic support team that took care of all the food and logistics business the day of. It was such a relief to have fewer things to be coordinating while the event was going on. Stew Diemont is my academic advisor and he pitched a design about agroforestry systems and spent his whole Saturday there which am so grateful for. BR and Lindsey from NYFC were very kind to let me just run with Farm Hack and while that kind of freedom was certainly intimidating, I learned so much from it. Really I'm just thankful to everyone who participated. You were all rock stars.

Ultimately, I learned that bringing farming and engineering together is useful. Local agriculture poses new design problems in that designs must be low budget and sustainable. Many of these issues have already been tackled on a much larger scale in industrial agriculture, but that equipment or those techniques are not affordable or effective at a smaller scale. For example, the mulch/manure spreader that BR and Creek cooked up -- I'm certain that has been done before in a different context. I received positive responses from the farmers and the students which made it all seem worth it.

Since I've already put in a sizable amount of legwork and there appears to be a demand for it, I'm hoping to pass this project along to an underclassmen for next year. I would gladly share that September is just about the worst time of year to plan an event for farmers and that if you would like to get funded at ESF, plan for it during the preceding academic year so that clubs can budget it in. I've also got a hefty list of contact information for farmers and local food people. Fellow ESF students, are you in?

The more I learn about farming and local food, the more it is apparent that the biggest hurdles are frequently business planning and finances. What if Farm Hack, or something like it, turned into a day of brainstorming business plans? Would that be helpful? Do business students do things like this already? I think I need make some business major friends.