Announcing the 2009 Hen & Harvest Garden Challenge:

If you are reading this, chances are food is important to you. You are passionate about gardening, or local food, or healthy eating, food security, organic farming methods, land stewardship… All of the above?

Maybe the seed catalogs are piling up. Maybe next year’s garden is taking shape in your head — and this time it’s going to be perfect. Maybe you’ve decided to take the plunge and finally get a few chickens. Maybe you want to give your children the healthiest food possible, or restore the land in your care to a more natural state. Maybe the headlines you see every day scare you just enough to browse that seed potato catalog. Or maybe you’ve been running a successful market garden for years now and are thinking about how to make it just a little bit better.

And who could blame you? Our primary food system is a mess. We increasingly rely on fossil fuels and chemicals to create processed foods that are probably eligible for frequent flyer miles. Poor nutrition is leading to increased obesity and other health problems. We have no idea who grew our food or how it got to our table. Or even what it’s made of in some cases. Large-scale farmers are struggling to get credit from banks, and commodity prices have fallen so far they may have trouble making their money back anyway. When you walk into the store, you worry that the milk is full of hormones, the grains are genetically modified, the meat is irradiated, the vegetables are contaminated, and the soil that produced it is lifeless and disappearing all too quickly.

For all his charisma and leadership, Barack Obama can’t fix this problem. Tom Vilsack won’t fix it either. Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver and Wendell Berry can’t even fix it. Fixing it is up to me, and you ,and anyone else we can influence.

This is why we are challenging you, right now, to turn your passion into something bigger.

It’s no secret that food pantries all over the country are struggling right now. As the economy falters, soup kitchens, shelters, and other under-the-safety-net entities are getting fewer donations and more clients every day. But… If we were to collectively donate ten percent of our harvest to our nearest food banks, soup kitchens, or other appropriate organizations, think of all the positive benefits. The people with the worst access to healthy food would at least get a little delicious, fresh, local produce. Kids whose only fault has been bad luck will get nutrition from something other than a box. Chances are very high that we’d get to meet some wonderful, dedicated people. We’d have one more excuse to get dirt under our fingernails and sunshine on our faces. And our gardens might even have fewer weeds if we’re doing it for a cause, rather than just killing time on the weekends.

Besides all that, it probably won’t even take much extra time, effort, or money on our parts. So our seed packets are a little lighter at the end of planting. So our lawns are a little smaller. In exchange, our local food security will get a little better, and our hearts might feel a little bigger. And we can drool over those seed catalogs a just little longer.

We’re challenging you to give at least one tenth of your produce to some worthy cause. If you can’t find a charity or other appropriate organization, see if a school cafeteria can use it. Or even your neighbors. Maybe it’ll inspire them to start a garden of their own. Food security is food security. And if the economy keeps going down the path it’s on now, food security is going to become more important all the time.

If you’ve never grown a garden before, we’d suggest you not worry about donating this year, and just get your hands dirty. Learn from the rest of us, and aim for donating next year. And if you get a bumper crop of something the first time out, find it a good home.

To keep everybody honest and on the ball, we’re going to have regular check-ins and discussions in The Barnyard, on the fifteenth of every month. In February, we’ll ask you about your plans, and maybe have some discussions about starting seeds indoors. In March we’ll look at some more details on what you’re doing, whether you’re using cold frames, row covers or any other tricks to get an early start. As the season progresses, we can all share tips, ideas, troubleshooting techniques, successes, and failures.

Once that garden finally starts to produce, we’ll have you report back with what’s growing well for you, how much you’ve been able to harvest, and who you found to donate it to.

Remember that every garden has its duds from year to year. If something’s not growing well, let us know and somebody will share ideas for next time. And there will be no garden police. If you only harvested ten strawberries, you don’t have to deliver one of them to the church basement. You can make it up in zucchini later.

We know we’re not the first to come up with an idea like this. (Plant a Row for the Hungry has been around for more than a decade.) But we also think that it’s more important than ever to issue a challenge like this.

We’ll primarily focus on gardening, but maybe you’re in a better position to donate baked goods, or eggs, or meat, or honey… whatever you feel is appropriate is fair game and welcome in the discussion.

So who’s in?

Head on over to The Barnyard’s brand new Garden Challenge group and tell us about yourself. Maybe where you live, how long you’ve been growing food, how big of a garden you’re hoping to grow, what level of commitment you’re willing to take on, who you might donate to, and anything else you want to share.

Let’s see what we can do…

[ NOTE - You don't have to join The Barnyard to participate. You can also just leave a comment on this post to let us know you're in. ]

The following is a guest post by John Michael Greer. He is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including his latest, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age. This post originally appear on his blog, The Archdruid Report.

As the current pullback in oil prices continues – one of the benchmark grades dropped to a little over $120 a barrel yesterday, though it jumped back up $4 in early trading today – peak oil skeptics have seized the opportunity to insist that there’s nothing wrong with the petroleum market that a few more trillion-dollar giveaways to the oil industry wouldn’t fix. One interesting lesson worth drawing from the current barrage of punditry is that most of people who reject the concept of peak oil don’t actually seem to know what the phrase means.

A case in point is a recent opinion piece that denounced peak oil as “sheer nonsense,” on the grounds that the world still has some forty years of oil left at today’s rate of production. The author of this piece somehow managed not to notice that the peak oil theory focuses on precisely the point he took for granted, the sustainability of today’s rate of production. The world may well have the equivalent of forty years’ worth of current annual petroleum production left in its reserves, but if the amount it can produce each year plateaus and then begins to shrink due to geological limits, a global economy founded on ever-expanding energy supplies is in trouble. That’s the essence of the peak oil position, and waving around claims about the absolute size of global reserves doesn’t address it at all. (more…)

Living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa I can offer an eyewitness account of the devastating flooding that has taken place in the Midwest this summer. 10 sq miles of our city, including our downtown area and a lot of the older housing inside of town was recently under water. You might not think that this would affect the availability of local foods, but it has. Local food systems in America are still very fragile and vulnerable, but yet they are also a major support line in the event of an emergency.

You see, our large farmer’s markets are in our downtown areas. The normal Saturday morning farmer’s market takes place in a parking lot right next to the river. Our bi-monthly large farmer’s market happens in the central business district, and extended onto the river with road closures on the bridges. This year the bi-monthly market had increased from 95 vendors to 144, a large increase.

But it’s not just flooding that has caused problems, but the rainy weather that has water logged and backed up the incoming crops, by at least a week or more. People are also dealing with the disaster that is a flood. Roads and bridges were closed, or washed out. People have their attention in other areas. Farmers who work jobs and raise crops are dealing with difficulties in both areas, as a large portion of businesses were flooded as well. Customers have turned their attention to other things and therefore the demand necessary to support the local farmers isn’t there. Local food systems are growing nationwide, but they are still fragile beasts right now, and need to be constantly nurtured and supported. When natural disasters strike it’s hard to do that.

Money is tight with 20% of the city flooded out of their houses, and the other 80% busy donating time, materials and money to the relief effort. Everyone has had to deal with it. It’s a strange situation. After experiencing a natural disaster like this I am even more convinced of the importance of local food supplies to avert a food crisis in the event of some type of disaster. I know I felt more confident in my families’ ability to cope with this disaster since we had food put up for emergencies, much of it locally grown. The problem is that our current local food systems are too fragile to be able to rebound from disasters like this.

This situation has also bolstered my belief in having some private gardening space. I have a garden in my backyard, and it has been my family’s saving grace for eating locally. The garden plot I rent from the city was flooded out by this disaster, and I’m not sure when it will be useable again. But having some food in our backyard has allowed me more control over what we’ve eaten in the wake of this disaster. In the event of a serious disaster, one in which food from any source wasn’t available, the garden and the food we have stored in the basement would be our sole sources of food. It’s comfort to have that plan.

While on occasion it has seemed silly to focus on local foods, and homegrown foods, when there is so much available at the store, in the face of this natural disaster, it has really helped my family weather the challenges and has prepared us to be able better help others recover. It’s easy to think that you won’t have an emergency in your area, but it can happen. The people in NH didn’t think they would have a tornado in their area. If you live in an area that is frequented by natural disasters be they wildfires, tornados, floods, hurricanes or other disasters you should really think about having some emergency food stores, creating some garden space and also nurturing local farmers who can supply your area with local products. But if you live an area that doesn’t have regular natural disasters don’t think it would make sense to be at least a little prepared, just in case? Think of it like a sort of insurance policy.

If you need more info on local foods try Local Harvest. Good luck!

Mosaic courtesy of this Flickr link.

Street photo courtesy of the NY Daily News. (For what it’s worth, this is 2nd St. 2 city blocks from the river’s edge.