The binder twine industry grew in response to the widespread adoption of the mechanical binder, linking international entities to the U.S. and Canadian harvests. Manila fiber from the Philippines, and Sisal and henequen from the Yucatan yielded twine that tied the tightest and were naturally insect repellent. Managing these materials and tools became an exercise in political identity: U.S. manufacturers produced a bevy of binder machines, but the Canadians levied heavy taxes on the imports to protect Canada’ agricultural implement industry. Additionally, because the U.S. harvest occurred occurred earlier than the Canadian harvest, manufacturers sold surplus twine to Canadians but lawmakers, fearing that this arrangement placed Canada at the mercy of U.S. market, worked hard to suppress this trade with tariffs, which were meant to support Canadian production efforts instead.
This piece on twine’s history as a black market item is a good reminder of how powerful agriculture is: it affects everything from the economy to trade policy to how we define contraband.
The Pig Roast is right now. Come up to the Yale Farm for slow-roasted pork, homemade barbecue sauce, and mess of vegetarian sides, plus live music, good conversation, and plenty of sunshine.
Two more spring images: Ben tending bees, F2 in early evening.
We often talk about the challenges of finding good local food during long, hard winters here in the northeast, but for all its beauty spring can be a tougher season: preserves run out, root cellars empty and fields come into slow maturity. For this reason, sourcing food for our late April Pig Roast is always a challenge, one we’re still figuring out how to manage.
This year, in addition to slow-smoked pork, homemade barbecue sauce, beans and cornbread, we’ve got carrots that over-wintered in the fields at Massaro Farm CSA, which we’ll pickle; when we came to the Farm to start that process this afternoon, we were thrilled to see the first spring radishes coming out of the ground. The radishes may not make it to the Pig Roast, but we’ll definitely have them at our first May market! The two kinds of roots were both getting washed in the prop house this afternoon, and it was sort of wonderful to see them side by side: the last harvest of the old season, and the first pink-and-white signs of the new.
& if you’re looking to get involved this week, we’ve got three workdays:
Bulldog Days Welcome Event: Farm Work & Pizza
Monday, 4/16, 2:00-5:00 pm
Come get your hands dirty from 2:00-3:00 pm, with pizza from our woo-fired oven served starting at 3:00 pm. Harvest leaders will be at Phelps Gate every half hour starting at 1:30 pm to walk groups up to the Farm.
Open Volunteer Work Hours
Wednesday, 4/18, 1:00-5:00 pm
Join our regular Wednesday workday and help get the Farm prepped and ready for spring planting. No experience in necessary and everyone is invited!
Pig Roast
Friday, 4/20, 1:00-5:00 pm
Welcome spring, roast a pig, dance to music and celebrate the end of another school year. It’s an experience you’ll always remember. Everyone is invited. We’ll have regular open volunteer work hours on the Farm from 1:00-3:00pm, with pig served and live music from 3:00-5:00 pm.
Every September, Yale opens its doors to a flood of incoming students, many of whom feel safe only when those doors swiftly close behind them. They hear through the grapevine—no relation to Enza’s grapevine—that New Haven is a dangerous place. When I came to New Haven a year ago, I found myself perplexed by this attitude. The ironclad gates and spike-topped fences created a physical barrier between classrooms and communities that had so much to offer one another. I craved a sense of belonging in this city, a city in which myself and 11,000 other students lived, but few called home. Then, a fortunate thing happened. I met Chris Randall.
For all of the prefrosh arriving on Yale’s campus for Bulldog Days today, a look at a different side of New Haven: its urban farmers and community gardeners, folks deeply invested in making the city a more liveable (and edible!) landscape.
Bringing Barbecue to Manhattan
Mark Maynard-Parisi on opening Blue Smoke with Danny Meyer. In just a few short weeks the YSFP will bring barbecue back to the Elm City with our Fifth Annual Last Day of Classes Jack Hitt Pig Roast, which happens April 20th from 1:00-5:00 pm.
Walmart's environmental initiatives in China have been heralded—most recently by Orville Schell in The Atlantic—as a key force in spurring other corporations to embrace sound environmental practices. My reporting—more than a year of research that took me from Arkansas to China—suggests a more complex, less flattering story: Walmart has made laudable though modest progress on many of its goals. But with the global economic slowdown tugging at the company's profit margins, people involved with the environmental campaign say the momentum seems to be stalling or vanishing entirely.
Whatever your stance on WalMart’s efforts to green its products, stores and, by extension, reputation, this piece on whether or not they’re accomplishing those goals in the first place is a must-read. Especially since, as Kroll puts it:
“In the past, Walmart’s outsize carbon footprint had made the company a favorite target of environmentalists. But in 2009, as hope for a congressional cap-and-trade deal evaporated and the Copenhagen climate talks ended in a stalemate, they [the National Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund] began to see Walmart in a different light: If they could make the world’s largest retailer greener, other businesses might follow suit. EDF had opened its own office near Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, embedding its employees in the “belly of the beast,” as one staffer put it. “Even though they’re a party of last resort, they’re our only hope at the moment,” said Linda Greer, an NRDC scientist who works with Walmart. “They have the potential to change the world.”
Anyone hoping to do well in the grocery business would be advised to take notice of Mogannam’s actions during his ten-minute morning tour of his store. The secrets are there in his hands-on grooming of the deli case, in his ditching the low-performing olive bar for more profitable stock and tasting the produce before it goes on the shelf, and in the dinner he cooks for his staff. That relentless editing and a razor-sharp focus on hospitality account for much of Bi-Rite’s extraordinary success—making it one of the most-watched markets in the country.
A great read on what makes a successful grocery store, and how that store can become a community anchor and crucial support for small-scale food producers across the system.
How could Robert and Fred — who produce so much more milk than their dad — end up making less money?
A fantastic NYT piece on the complicated economics of modern dairy farming— and a primer for understanding why things like this are happening all too frequently.
