After I registered for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY) Locavore Challenge last year, I set up this blog to share my experiences trying to eat almost eating locally in Western New York during the harvest month of September. Unfortunately, my mom had to go out of town soon after the challenge started to deal with the death of a relative, so I (at age sixteen) ended up doing way more of the cooking than I bargained for. So the first part of September I was too occupied with simply getting food on the table three times a day to worry about blogging, and I just never got in the habit.
Despite my struggles in the beginning of last year's Locavore Challenge, I ended up really enjoying it. I decided to enroll in the NOFA-NY Locavore Challenge again this year and start up this blog again, too. To reintroduce myself and to share what's changed about me over the course of the past year, I've put some quotes from what I shared in first post on this blog last year below in bold, followed by an update on each statement in italics.
2010: I already have a tiny business raising and selling meat and eggs from heritage chickens and turkeys raised on pasture without antibiotics and the like.
2011: Well, a big aspect of my tiny business has shrunk. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong with hatching and brooding turkeys this year, so I only have four little ones instead of the twenty to forty I'd usually be raising to sell for Thanksgiving. My family may end up eating all four of the turkeys ourselves.
The chickens are doing better than the turkeys. I've doubled my laying flock from ten hens and a rooster to nineteen hens and two roosters, and have no problem selling the eggs. I'm now raising over forty chicks that I hatched myself. The males will be butchered later this fall for meat, both for personal consumption and for sale, and the females will expand our laying flock.
2010: In the next couple of years, I hope to start my own organic farm on the impoverished East Side of Buffalo.
2011: I still certainly want to become a farmer. However, I'm much less sure if I want to farm on the East Side of Buffalo, or if I even want to go into urban farming at all. I'm planning on starting to intern on farms next spring, once I finish up my schoolwork for high school. I'm also very interested in applying for FoodCorp, where I'd spend a year on things like community gardens and nutrition education in an inner-city community somewhere in America. Anyways, I'm hoping to work on food and agriculture in a few different settings over the next several years so can learn both basic organic farming skills and what setting I'd like to farm in. Wherever I end up farming, whether in the country or the city, I do know that food justice is something that I definitely want to make an integral part of my farm.
2010: As a poultry producer, gardener, CSA member, and farmers' market shopper, I already get much of my food locally from May through November. However, I've been wanting to see if I could become a complete locavore ever since I read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
2011: As mentioned above, I still keep poultry. My garden has expanded a lot since last year (although I'd still love it to be bigger!) and I still shop at a farmers' market. I've expanded my food shopping to include farms stands down my street and Farmers and Artisans. The latter is a direct result of the last years Locavore Challenge. The former is largely due to the fact that we stopped getting a vegetable share from our CSA, Thorpes, though we a still buy a fruit share and a winter share.
2010: If I enjoy being a locavore, I might not stop after September 30th!
2011: Locavorism was certainly not enjoyable at the beginning last September. My parents had signed onto the project with little hesitation earlier in the summer, but were not nearly as enthusiastic when it locavorism became a reality. My dad was especially annoyed.
By the end of September, though, I'd won pretty much won him over. I think it was my cooking. We became a little more relaxed about non-local items once October came around, but we were still eating a mainly local diet through the end of January. Then the winter squash that we'd saved from our garden ran out and the deer at all the wonderful carrots in the field that would have been going into our winter share from the CSA we belong to, and things just fell apart from there.
A lot of people seem to think that eating locally would be boring because of its limits (like no strawberries in January). After our months of locavorism, we found it to be just the opposite. There was no excitement about the new crop that had just come in, and we had forgotten about how to plan meals without the urgency of fresh foods from the garden or CSA share that needed to be used up quickly. Since none of us were to excited about using as a lot of out-of-season produce from the grocery store, we ended up eating the eating the same few meals over and over again.
We couldn't have been more excited when the East Aurora Farmers' Market started again in May. By the end of June, it felt like a good chunk of our food was once again local, and it's the percent of our diet that's local has steadily increased since then. I think our mindset is already that of locavores, and I know it will be a much smoother transition into locavorism this September than last.
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