September 2009
4 posts
Found It
Awhile back, I promised to look into the history of community sponsored agriculture, the model that my farm uses to sell most of its produce. Apparently the standard narrative is that CSAs started in Japan in the 1970s when a group of women concerned about pesticides formed subscription-partnerships with local farms, and that this model spread to Europe and the US. While the first part of that is...
Where to Ash
Here’s another major problem with the TVA spill and cleanup: once TVA gets the coal ash out of the river, there’s really no good way to dispose of it. TVA’s solution has been to pay a poor town in Alabama to let them dump the ash in an abandoned mine. In the short-term, this does help the town financially, and most people agree that this type of “dry storage” is...
Exeunt
There have been a lot of changes on the farm in the past couple of weeks. All of them stem from the fact that the farmer and his wife have decided that this will be their last season here. They’re in the process of selling the farm, not simply as land and a house, but hopefully also as a business. I’ve known this since the first week I got here, but it didn’t seem like much of...
The Spectrum
I’ve been talking to people from what seem to be the two most important—for lack of a better term—citizen watchdog groups in the TVA region. One is the afore-mentioned United Mountain Defense (they of the TVA smokestack puppets), and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. But although they share some very broad environmental concerns, they take very different views of TVA.
The Southern...
August 2009
7 posts
Red Meat Tape
We finally got the latest round of meat back last week. The farmer had quite a bit of trouble getting touch with the meat processor to make sure our beef and pork was ready. They wouldn’t pick up their phone or answer his messages on the day he was scheduled to pick it up, and since it’s a four hour round trip to the processor, he didn’t want to drive all the way there just to...
Growing Progress
One evening last week our old-timer neighbor came over with his wife. He brought this as a present for the farmer’s four-year-old son:
It’s Dan, the “Answer Plot Man”! Here’s the side of the package:
Talking about it the next day, the farmer and I couldn’t quite figure whether or not it was a joke. Basically, Dan, the “Answer Plot Man,” is a...
Green Power (Bait and) Switch
I’ve been hearing this ad on the radio for TVA’s “green power switch” program. The idea behind the program is pretty simple, and the radio ad makes it sound pretty good: a TVA customer—any ordinary person—can install solar panels or wind turbines on their house and generate their own energy. TVA buys back the power they generate, at about twice the retail rate. So the more...
Horror Movie Donkey
In the early mornings a thick fog smothers the farm. The fog hadn’t yet retreated back into the hills today when the farmer and I were harvesting kale. Something bellowed in the distance.
“Hear that?” said the farmer. “Donkey. I swear that sound’s been used in some horror movie. Terrifies ignorant cityfolk.”
I considered admitting that the only scary donkey...
Nothing New?
The reports that have been coming out over the past couple of weeks criticize TVA for dysfunctional management: its various departments can’t communicate with one another, its board isn’t in touch with what’s happening on the ground, or how its policies are being carried out. I’ve been reading a book called Prisoners of Myth by Erwin Hargrove, that talks about the...
Focus Your Fruits
[Our upright citizens.]
We’re finally getting some tomatoes. You might think we want the plants to grow as big, and produce as much fruit, as possible. This isn’t the case with tomatoes. If we let them go, they would naturally sprawl out along the ground in an unwieldy tangle. When that happens the plant produces more fruit, but ones with less taste that are harder to pick. So we...
R.I.P., Curly
Last night, one of our neighbors, a real old-timer, paid us a visit after dinner. He and the farmer and I took a walk over by the pig run.
“Where’s the third one?” asked the old-timer. The farmer’s little boy had named the three pigs Larry, Moe and Curly.
“Well, you know how you always said you can’t make a pig sick?” said the farmer. “I found a...
July 2009
13 posts
The Inside Word
Another big TVA shakeup this week: Yesterday, the TVA’s Inspector General, Richard Moore, issued an independent report on the causes of the Kingston ash spill. Even in comparison to last week’s analysis from an Atlanta consulting firm, the Inspector General was tough on the TVA. Basically, he said what a lot of people outside of the TVA have been saying for months: the spill could have...
InstaPundit covers TVA protest
The “BlogFather,” libertarian blogger Glenn Reynolds, unwittingly ended up at the United Mountain Defense mountaintop removal protest on Sunday while having brunch in Market Square. Here’s his take.
A University of Tennessee law professor and Knoxville native, Reynolds opposes coal power but—like TN senator Lamar Alexander—only because he favors nuclear power.
The Opposition
Today I attended the anti-TVA rally and march in downtown Knoxville. It was organized by Mountain Justice and United Mountain Defense, two groups committed to clean air and water in the Appalachians. The demonstration had two main messages: end mountaintop removal mining and clean up the Kingston ash spill. (The TVA is the biggest buyer of coal obtained from mountaintop removal in America.)...
Today Was a Good Day to Die
If you were a rooster.
What’s the organic way to kill a chicken?
Hatchet.
No more being woken up at five in the morning. I never thought I’d be able to say I would sleep better for having killed something.
Rumblings
These also started showing up around Knoxville yesterday.
More on the TVA structural review
From the Knoxville News Sentinel:
“In the fossil plant division, the review found that control was split, with four separate TVA divisions charged with responsibilities involving ash storage facilities but little communication among them. In one example, the study found that ash handlers at Kingston continued dredging in the fall and winter of 2008 after engineers had warned them in...
Cultivate Your Corporate Culture
Yesterday saw some pretty big TVA news. A consulting firm called McKenna Long & Aldridge released a report on the Authority’s organizational problems. TVA hired the firm for $2 million (a drop in the bucket compared to the spill’s cleanup costs ) to issue an independent report on the problems that led to the Kingston coal plant spill in December. Unlike the report commissioned from...
This Cheese Tastes Like Civilization
When I said I was going to work on an organic farm for the summer, somebody asked, “Are you going to be one with nature?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I’m also going to find myself and achieve ultimate zen.”
That said, I now realize just how much farming—even organic farming—is not about being one with nature. It’s about tricking nature, bending it to do...
Support Your Local Organic Bean Picker
[Somebody’s fantasy of what a C.S.A. share looks like.]
I mentioned in the first post about the farm that they sold most of their produce through a C.S.A. Now I realize that not everyone knows what a C.S.A is. It stands for “Community Sponsored Agriculture” and is basically a system where small farmers sell directly to people in their community. For a lump sum, the farmer...
Dam It, Norris
Leaving Norris, I drove a few miles up the road to Norris Dam, the first dam built by the Tennessee Valley Authority. FDR passed the TVA Act, one of the most important acts of his first hundred days, in May, 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression. Completed three years later, the dam was named after George Norris, a Nebraska senator who had been advocating a public power authority in the...
In the TVA's Garden
Today, I visited the town of Norris, which is about an hour and half drive west from the farm. Modeled after English garden cities, its small, neat houses sit on well-tended plots along winding roads. The Tennessee Valley Authority built the town in 1933 to house workers and administrators building nearby Norris Dam. To someone who grew up in today’s suburbs, Norris looks like a quaint,...
The Facts About the Farm
First, a dry introduction to set the stage: I arrived on the farm five days ago. It’s located on a hill outside a tiny town an hour northeast of Knoxville. The farm encompasses about sixty acres, but only one and half acres of that is devoted to garden produce—beans, kale, corn, squash, carrots, onions, garlic, basil—and then another six is pasture for the cows, pigs, sheep and chickens....
What I'm Doing Here
This is a blog about my experience on a small organic farm in the eastern Tennessee Valley.