Introducing Guidestone’s Land-Link Initiative

By: Allison A.

As many of you know, we have three key guiding mantras here at Guidestone:

• We connect people to the land and land to the people.
• We grow farmers.
• We support and revitalize our local food economy and food culture.

Over the last several months, the board and staff of Guidestone have been developing a new project that has the potential of significantly contributing to the fulfillment of all three of those mantras.

The agricultural lands of the Central Colorado Rockies are currently faced with substantial development pressure, water is being removed from the land and their rights are being sold to municipalities and corporations far away from their source. Many would-be young farmers and ranchers are moving to the city rather than choosing to take over the family farm while other would-like-to-be farmers and ranchers cannot afford or have no access to productive land. Our expectation is that this new project will provide a healthy alternative to all of those scenarios.

The Land-Link Initiative will work to connect retiring farmers and ranchers as well as absentee landowners with next generation farmers. The initiative will create a database that provides solutions to the challenges of access to farmland, security of tenure, long-term affordability and stewardship of the resources. Guidestone’s services will assist with crafting the lease and equitable agreements between the landowner and the farmer. These agreements provide economically viable options for landowners that keep the agricultural heritage and water on their land intact. In addition, this program will support beginning farmers through an educational curriculum with a strong emphasis in financial planning, marketing strategies, business plans, food policy, legal issues, and production techniques.

Currently, the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union is providing technical assistance to Guidestone in procuring a USDA grant, which, if awarded, will provide initial funding for a land-link pilot program for Chaffee County. To meet the requirements of the grant, Guidestone must provide a $10,000 matching fund. A number of local organizations have already written letters of support of this project and many have pledged financial support in contribution to the matching fund. A list of these organizations can be found on our website.

Programs similar to this Land-Link Initiative are in place in twenty other states throughout the U.S. Already, Guidestone has received a number of applications to participate in the pilot program – both landowners and farmers. Our hope is that the Guidestone Land-Link Initiative will become a model project in Colorado and will later serve as a template for other regional or statewide land-link programs.

Allison's Righteous Carrot Cupcakes

Carrot cake is a wonderful autumn comfort food. Make a batch of cupcakes and either freeze a few for a later time or make your friends smile by giving them away. We like using hazelnuts, but that is because we have a great source in Oregon. The walnuts or the pecans both make a fantastic cake. Enjoy!!

Cakes

4 Large Eggs
3/4 C Canola Oil
3/4 C Applesauce
2 t vanilla
1 C Turbinado (or granulated sugar)
1/4 C Honey
2 C Whole Wheat Flour
1 1/2 t Baking Soda
1 t Baking Powder
1 1/2 t Salt
1 T Ground Cinnamon
1/2 t Ground Nutmeg
2 1/2 C Finely Grated Carrots
1 C Chopped Pecans, Walnuts, or Hazelnuts
1 C Shredded Unsweetened Coconut
1 C Raisins

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease and flour muffin pan or line with cupcake papers. Beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl with an electric mixer, and add the oil and apple sauce while the mixer is running. Add the vanilla, then sprinkle in the sugar and honey. You will have a thick, foamy mixture. Whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices in a medium bowl. Add these dry ingredients to the eggs and oil in your mixing bowl, mixing to make a smooth batter. Add the carrots, raisins, and nuts, then the coconut. Pour the batter into the prepared muffin pan. Fill each pan 3/4 full.

Bake the cakes for 20 minutes, then check the middle with a toothpick to see if any batter sticks. The cakes are done when a toothpick comes out of the center clean. Cool completely on a wire rack then frost.

Cream Cheese Frosting

This particular frosting is low in sugar but still acts as the perfect compliment to the carrot cake.

8 oz Cream Cheese
5 T Unsalted Butter
2 t Vanilla
1/4 C Powdered Sugar

Have the cream cheese cold. The butter can be cold, but preferably at room temperature. Combine in a food processor and pulse just until smooth and creamy. If the frosting is too stiff, pulse for a few seconds longer. Do not over process.

Ark Valley Voice October Issue Features Local Food Issue

The cover story of the Ark Valley Voice October print edition is "The Local Food Issue". The article, Valley Sees Biggest Jump in Local Food Production Since 1930, features Guidestone's David Lynch who talks about the Land-Link Initiative.

To read the article in it's entirely, you'll have swing by and pick up a hard copy. Otherwise, you can read the first several paragraphs at this link.

Farmhands Article in Chaffee County Times

The Chaffee County Times recently published this article about Guidestone's Farmhands program:

"Being connected to the land is a way of life in the American West. Nowhere is this more evident than at Guidestone, a sustainable-farm project nonprofit organization. Its roots have been firmly planted in Colorado soil since 1992 with a dedication to creating a sustainable local food economy..."

Read Sustainable-farm project includes educational day camps here.

3rd Annual Pumpkin Patch Festival: October 17 & 18 and October 24 & 25, 2009

Autumn is a time of color and wonder in the Arkansas Valley and there’s no better way to celebrate it than to take part in its seasonal festivities. One such event will be the third annual Pumpkin Patch Festival at Cottonwood Meadows in Buena Vista. The Pumpkin Patch Festival is a two weekend celebration open to the public which offers a variety of activities and amusements for the whole family.

You can join in on a horse-drawn wagon ride pulled by a local team of horses. They’ll pull you out to the patch where you can pick the perfect pumpkin. Bring it back and carve it at the farm. Or, if you’d prefer, you can carve it at home and spend your time running through the hay-bale maze, playing cow-pie bingo, bidding in a silent auction, enjoying a barbecue lunch, sipping hot-apple cider and enjoying homemade pies and cookies, bobbing for apples, visiting and petting the rabbits, horses, calves, ducks, chickens, dogs and more. You can have your face painted, see fire trucks and learn about fire safety with the Chaffee County Fire Department, take a walk through the gardens or back to the beautiful meadows along Cottonwood Creek. Be sure to visit the raw milk dairy and Colorado Grown, a distribution center specializing in locally grown and Colorado-based products.

Admission is five dollars for adults and children three and over. The cost of admission and the barbecue will go to support Farmhands Education, a program of the non-profit Guidestone, which aims to join children with the hands-on experience of small scale, local food production. The Farmhands Pumpkin Patch hours are Saturday, October 17th and 24th from 10am to 4pm and Sunday, October 18th and 25th from 12pm to 4pm. For more information or to schedule education programs for your group schools, contact Andrea at Guidestone 719-395-5814. Special thanks to Cottonwood Meadows, Weathervane Farm, The Dairy at Cottonwood Creek and Guidestone for their support

Life on a Farm!

By Judie Anders

Last week I was invited to attend a Farm Feast prepared by one of my favorite friends, Charlie, age 5. It was the completion of a three day Farm Camp experience for youngsters ages 5-7. We ate carrots, radishes, beets, cooked chard & kale all fresh picked from the garden, eggs from the chickens and homemade Ice Cream with wild harvested gooseberries on top made with creamy milk from the cows. It was delicious! What was even more enjoyable was seeing the shining faces of the children as they sang a song they made up about their farm experience about the cow Unbelievable who gave birth to a calf the night before including lots of laughter about the animals and how much fun it is to be on a farm.

Farming life is foreign to most of us even in this agricultural county, with fewer young people going into the farming and ranching lifestyle. I salute John Cogswell, owner of The Meadows, for hosting the programs and Weathervane Farm and Cottonwood Creek Dairy for allowing the plants and animals to be enthusiastically loved by these youngsters. The Farmhands Program is created and run by Guidestone, a non-profit educational organization that serves the Upper Arkansas River Valley of Colorado. Its goals are to Grow Farmers; To Connect people to the land and land to the people; and To Support and revitalize our local food economy and food culture. Andrea Earley Coen, a banjo playin “farmer” heads up each of the programs offered. Andrea has a degree in Geology and has taught middle school Science/Earth Science and designs the programs to meet Colorado State Science standards. She comes with 20 years of outdoor teaching experience in environmental education and an obvious love of the earth and the critters and kids (goats and human). If you're a teacher looking for a fun field trip for your students, you might want to contact Farmhands about setting up a program that can both take place on the farm and meet CO State Science Standards.

I was very inspired by this program which introduces children in a practical grounded way to where their food comes from, how it is grown and how delicious fresh vegetables can be. There’s still time this summer to get in on the action. Here’s the info on upcoming events:
Join Farmhands Education for one or many of these fun, hands-on programs based at The Meadows at Cottonwood Creek in Buena Vista. Designed for children ages 5-11, all programs are interactive, educational, and exciting opportunities to experience a working farm, meet the farm animals, assist with farm projects and explore the surrounding natural habitat. Local producers Weathervane Farm and Cottonwood Creek Dairy provide the hands-on “classroom.”

JUNIOR FARMERS
July 28 - ages 5-7, 9:30-11:30am; July 29 - ages 8-11, 10am-2pm
Don your overalls and come on out to the farm for a day of good-ole, down home farm work and fun. We will help work on some projects for Weathervane Farm, and the day will conclude with a special, tasty frozen treat thanks to the cows at Cottonwood Creek Dairy!

FARM CAMP
Aug. 3rd-5th - ages 5-7
If a one-day program seems too short, come join us for this unique and exceptionally fun 3-day program. Each day begins with farm chores and a snack. Then it really gets exciting! Days will be filled with teambuilding, nature exploration, aquatic ecology, farm projects, art, journaling, music and possibly even a hint of magic…. We will conclude the camp with a farm feast, harvested and prepared by the campers for their families. Offered throughout the summer. We hope to see you there!

FAMILY FARM DAY
Aug. 1st 9-11:30am
Want to come to camp, too? Here’s your chance! Spend a morning on the farm with the whole family. Meet and feed the animals, tour the farm, assist in a farm project and create a farm-inspired craft to take home. A farm-grown snack will be provided. You are invited to bring a picnic lunch and stay as long as you like!

Pre-registration is required for all programs. Please contact Andrea Earley Coen at (970)309-3175 or pflower[at]sopris.net to register or for more information.

A Perspective on the Cow Tax.

By Joel Benson

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced that greenhouse gases may endanger public health or welfare. This discovery will be under public eyes for 60 days of comment. While the statement may be true, particularly given concerns over global climate change, there are some significant unintended consequences that could follow, including consequences that would affect the relatively few producers here in along the Upper Arkansas River Valley as well as the plentiful consumers.

If the EPA settles on its decision, then emissions of methane, among other gases, have to be regulated. Methane comes from a many, many sources, but primarily decomposition in an environment that has no oxygen, such as a landfill, a bog, rice fields, and the stomachs of animals. We are concerned with the latter, cows in particular. Ogden Nash wrote, “The cow is of the bovine ilk; One end is moo; the other, milk." One additional product of the cow is gas. Biogas, if you will. According to one study, a single Holstein dairy cow can fill 140 two-liter bottles with gas in a single day. An 1800 animal dairy (Holsteins) can produce 48,000 pounds of manure in a day, or more than 17 million pounds in a year. The manure can be composted or, with proper grazing management, put out on the fields. Flatulence and burped gas cannot. So, the EPA would have to regulate this methane. A policy is put into place and regulators get busy enforcing this policy. The EPA would now have a “cow tax” or “flatulent tax”. For each cow you have, you pay a tax to offset its potential damage.

Let’s analyze the policy. We have to ask ourselves what problem the policy is trying to address. Then we work to get to the root cause of the problem.

First, what is the problem that the policy is trying to address? Global climate change.
Second, the root cause: Why does global climate change happen? Many, many factors contribute and one piece of conventional wisdom says that there are too many greenhouse gases. Why are there too many greenhouse gases? We are burning fossil fuels and cows burp and fart methane. Regardless of your opinions on the validity of global climate change, I will focus on this last question; the answer to which gives a tremendous breakdown in logic.

We visit the sources stated: Fossil fuels and methane.
Fossil fuels: This is not the subject of this article. There is a lot to say about this subject and experts from around the globe are debating the topic and creating new industry that deals with fossil fuels and distribution networks. One note, if we were to stop all burning of fossil fuels, we would not stop the build up of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
Methane: We will address methane in depth, as it is the ‘problem’ that the cow tax policy is trying to address.
Other sources: We as global citizens generally do not talk about fire as a contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gases. One acre of rainforest burning is the equivalent to the annual emissions of 16 vehicles in the United States. Millions of acres burn each year. On average 3.8 million acres burn in the United States alone. Most of the continent of Africa burns annually. The argument goes, that fire is natural. This statement should be visited in depth and the role of fire as opposed to other tools, such as herds of animals, should be visited. The point in bringing this up is that there are other significant sources of greenhouse gases that do not get the attention they deserve.

This argument brings up the fact that there may be more to global climate change than we first assume and therefore we may not be treating the root cause of the problem. But, we investigate: are cows the root cause of the problem?

As far as I can tell, there are studies that measure methane produced in a confined animal lot, or feedlot. A bag is attached to the back end of a cow and a hose to the front end with a meter that accounts for methane and other gases emitted. Measure, average the readings, and enact a tax. But, cows did not evolve to eat grain as their primary feed, rather grass. The microorganisms inside the rumen of a cow behave differently for different feeds. If a cow primarily ate that which it evolved to digest, namely grass, the methane levels would change. And again, if the cow spent a majority of its days on pasture where its manure would decompose outside of a massive pile of anaerobic dung, total methane would be reduced. Furthermore, the activity of a cow can affect the growth of the grass and the microorganisms in the soil, actually removing carbon and sequestering it into the ground. The curiosity: feedlot animals are not pastured animals. Granted, most every cow in the country is in a ‘feedlot’ at some point in its life, and even the anticipated new organic rules state that a cow only needs 30% of its diet for 120 days from pasture. But the interplay with pasture will change the flatulence of cows, and therefore gives cause to reevaluate the cow tax. Conclusions of a study carried out on feedlot animals may not pertain to pasture. Perhaps the management of cows by humans and the resultant behavior of cows are more the root cause of the influx of methane.

So, the policy of a ‘cow tax’ does not address the root cause of the problem of contributing greenhouse gas. I do not bring up the actual build up of gas nor how to remove greenhouse gases. The inability of the soil to sequester carbon may be closer to the root cause of the problem than actually putting carbon and methane into the atmosphere. Even so, the taxation of cows that eat food that they did not evolve to eat, i.e. corn, and managing them in large feedlot operations, address a symptom of the problem. The policy of a ‘cow tax’ is flawed from the outset because it will not do what it intends.

We then look at the externalities. The Upper Arkansas has a limited growing season. Cows are generally pastured in the summer and hayed in the winter. Some grain will be fed, but not to the extent or ration that is done in a conventional feedlot. Across-the-board ‘emission fees’ would jeopardize the solvency of any ranching or dairy in the valley. According to calculations by the American Farm Bureau Federation farmers and ranchers would pay $175 per dairy cow and $87.50 per beef cow. Levying a tax places an additional burden on our local producers and may be a tipping point to encourage ranchers to sell property and water rights to other entities. Perhaps not, but the potential of both water moving out of the county and the area’s green agricultural fields being turned into subdivisions grows significantly. What some call open space or viewsheds could disappear from the valley as well as a potential supply of beef and milk. Furthermore, meat prices will go up as we the consumer offset the cow tax.

The policy fails on all accounts.