Tag: environment

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Change

Change is afoot here at the Klesick Family Farm. The first change happened last weekend. I was blessed to walk our oldest daughter, Emily, down the aisle! Making that walk is an incredibly emotional moment in a father’s life. In the last two summers, Micah got married, Aaron got married, and now Emily is married. It is a little different, giving away a daughter than it is receiving a new daughter into our family. After all, this is my little girl, who I’d always known would find the love of her life and decide to get married, but it happened way faster than I ever imagined! Joelle and I are very excited for Keiran to join our family and to hand over to him one of our greatest treasures, so that they can begin their journey together.

For those of us who are parents, our children are our most precious crop. We pour our lives into them, teaching them, giving to them, and believing in them. A wedding is a culmination of all of these AND you get a new family member. Emily’s wedding was pretty special.

Another much smaller change that we have made at the Klesick family house and on the farm is to cut out plastic wrap. It has taken a little adjusting, but we are making it work. It is just so easy and efficient to use plastic wrap. But here we are, three weeks into the New Year, and voila, the trash is less full and we have discovered there is life after plastic wrap. Who would’ve have known!

We have located all of our bowls that “had” lids and purchased a set of silicone lids and a few sets of the clear plastic bowl covers. We have mostly used the clear plastic bowl covers because most of the larger main meals like soup or roasts already have lids for the pans we cook in. The silicone lids are excellent for covering salad type bowls. One thing I have noticed is that we rarely cover anything on a plate anymore, whereas before we would routinely use plastic wrap for covering a plate of leftovers.

We are also switching to a re-useable pallet wrap for our business. This move alone will save one garbage can of plastic going to the landfill a week. Another environmentally friendly move we are considering is switching to emailed invoices.

Let us know how your family or business re-uses every day items to benefit the environment.  You can email us or share your ideas on FB, twitter or Instagram!

Thanks for supporting our good food network!
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Bees and Butterflies

There has been a lot of news surrounding the honey bees and butterflies in the agricultural world. Large multi-national companies are spending/investing big dollars into research to figure out why these two insects, primarily honey bees, are dying in droves.

Honey bees are best known for their honey, but their pollination services are the most sought after commodity. It only makes sense that honey bees and Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) are making headlines and garnering the lion’s share of research dollars.

Honestly—no, bluntly—honey bees and butterflies are really “canaries in the coal mine.” They are bell weather indicators to the health of our agricultural systems. If the health of honey bees is an indication of the health of our food supply, we are in trouble, big trouble.

I would make the stretch to say that conventional or chemical agriculture and most non-organic world farms are detrimental to the ability of honey bees to survive. American farmers have plenty of toxic options to kill pest, weeds and anything else they don’t want competing with their crops, and, unfortunately, there are no selective insecticides. Farmers just kill the good and the bad and wreak havoc on the balance of nature. And really, there are no bad or good insects, they each provide an important ecological function, just some insects are more desirable or beneficial in our minds.

I would contend that we are not going to solve the plight of the honey bee, butterfly or the thousands of unnamed insects until we embrace the problem. The honey bee die-off is the symptom, much like heart disease is a symptom. The solution mostly lies in changing how we farm, not changing the honey bee.

Large chemical companies are lining up to “help” solve, in my opinion, the very problem they have created with the production of their chemical products. It is, at best, an expensive public relations campaign or possibly some form of mitigation. I have little faith that the research will yield actual solutions because that would require these companies to go out of business, which is not an option for them.

Just maybe, if the American public wants to save the honey bee, it might inadvertently save itself because the only thing that is going to save the honey bee is a change in how we farm. One thing is for sure, improving the health of the American people has not proven itself to be a big enough driver to elicit the change, but maybe the honey bee will have enough sting to make it happen!

The other way to save the honey bee is to continue to do what you are doing now—supporting local farms that value all life and raise food that doesn’t support the chemical companies.

 

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