NPR on the Farm on the Farm

Farmers listen to a lot of NPR. Or maybe it is that a lot of farmers listen to NPR. My guess is that both are true.

When you are standing in a packing shed all afternoon, weighing and counting vegetables to then pack them into waxed cardboard boxes; in a cheeserie all day washing dishes, stirring curd and packing cheese; milking goats before sun-up even on the longest days of the year; or seeding thousands of tiny, float-off-able lettuce seeds in the early spring greenhouse...it helps to have something engaging to listen to. NPR calms the brain that is constantly writing an eternal farm to-do list (ok, and non-farm to-do list as well) and it provides a news and entertainment source for someone who doesn't have much time to read the paper (or...dare I say it...preference to watch television).

I love my NPR, and lately I enjoy the hours in the cheese room blissed out in repetitive action (like packing seven ounces of fresh cheese into at least fifty small deli container using a spoon as my tool) and soaking in the new-to-me voices of Wisconsin Public Radio's Ideas Network. There are the quirky regional shows like Garden Talk and Zorba Paster on Your Health, some of which are a so ripe as to almost be a parody of Saturday Night Live's Delicious Dish. There are also the go-to National shows like Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and All Things Considered. Oh how I love to hear Neal Conan's gruff and sometimes off-putting personality surface with Talk of the Nation: it means lunch time is getting nearer. 

I will not admit to anything less than being a giant NPR geek. I enjoy my farm days, in part, because I have unencumbered access to the radio. I become an information sponge as I park my self next to the radio speakers all day long. And sometimes, just sometimes, it seems like the public radio programmers create a day of programming just for me. They must know I am their number one fan, and exactly what I want to hear, because the air waves have carried a number of great farm and food shows in the past weeks. Let's just say that it's been fun and almost surreal to hear a disembodied radio voice ask, "Do you know who grows your food? As more people turn to local food, more women take up farming. There's an increasing chance that there's a woman running the farm that grows your food. Find out more in the next hour." All we could do in the cheeserie was smile a little and say, yup.

Here's a list of the farm and food pieces from the last few weeks. Take a gander from your desk, barn, front porch and enjoy. I'm glad that the farm topic is getting continued air time and happy to spread the word to other NPR geeks.
   
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Women in Farming
July 11 on the Larry Meiller Show
Lisa Kivirist, director of the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) Rural Women's Project, and Janet Gamble of Turtle Creek Gardens talk about women in farming and the upcoming In Her Boots training sessions. The In Her Boots courses are for women, taught by women, and cover basics on a variety of farming and food related business topics. I want to go...but they're a bit far away. Swoon.

'Field Songs'
July 25 on Talk of the Nation
Neal Conan talks with William Elliot Whitmore about this album dedicated to the new American small farmer, and hitting heavy on a dreamy farm aesthetic. I got all excited when they said he lives on a farm in Iowa. Turns out it's a horse farm, and he spends most of his time traveling...

Sheepish 
July 25 on the Larry Meiller Show
Catherine Friend talks about her new book Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep & Enough Wool to Save the Planet. Catherine and her partner raise sheep for wool on their Minnesota farm. The story of these two city women moving to the country to start a farm was sounding familiar when I realized I had read Friend's earlier book Hit by a Farm (2006), which traced the tale of two city women moving to the country to start a farm... The first book was nice, but could have used a little something special. Undoubtedly spurred by another 10 years of farm stories and the popularity of small farms and local food (er, wool), Friend put pen to paper again on the same topic. I'm glad she's given it another shot, Sheepish is undoubtedly on my winter reading list. [And I can admit I am totally envious of a successful woman-writer-farmer.]

Wisconsin Cheese Originals
July 26 on the Larry Meiller Show
Jeanne Carpenter of Wisconsin Cheese Originals talks cheese. What could be better. I actually listened to this one on the computer while working at my city job, twice.

Dive!
July 29 on the Veronica Rueckert Show
Jeremy Seifert, writer and director of the documentary Dive! introduces listeners to the fine art of dumpster diving and a graspable image of the vast quantities of edible food thrown out in American trash cans and dumpsters each year. I was prepared for a talk from a hipster dumpster diver, and was instead pleasantly surprised to be met with an education, rational perspective of food waste shown through the unique lens of someone who finds it in the trash. Much less pedantic and much more fully researched than Tristram Stewart's book Waste, I think this documentary will be entertaining and a great teaching tool for the classroom. I am excited to dive into this one when it's available.

The Food We Brought 
August 19 on Here on Earth: Radio without BordersJane Ziegelman of the Culinary Center at the Tenement Museum in New York City talks about the cultural foods brought to America by immigrants and the response by those already living in the country. So this isn't farming directly, but it's a beautiful talk about food and the place it holds in our lives.

Pack It All In

There is something about this part of the year, when time speeds up...catapulting us toward the harvest gold days of late summer and early autumn as we still cling to the bountiful light of summer. The transformation is creeping in. The mornings are slightly darker as I prepare breakfast, and sometimes coffee, before heading to the farm. I like to pretend the darkness is from the cloud cover of this cool week, but I know that the days are getting shorter. This is not, of course, a new thing...as the days have been shortening since the solstice all the way back in June. There comes a time when you start to notice longer shadows, a different yellow hue to the sunlight and the precious fewer seconds of sunlight each day. I believe this time of year brings about a bit of a frenzy, a hurry to pack it all in before the stretches of daylight turn to stretches of crisp starry skies and the inevitable return of sweater season.

And so it goes. The beets, collected as ingredients for the canning spree two week ago, remained in the fridge unused. Now they simmer on the stove on their way to becoming Cold Pink Borscht in a Glass, substituting small, red torpedo onions for the shallots and yearning for that dollop of Sugar River Dairy whole milk yogurt for the final whisk. The pizza dough saved from earlier in the week is a much needed vehicle for the cheese remnants in the special drawer (Dreamfarm Garlic Fresh Cheese, Rogue Creamery Blue and overly salted feta Diana asked if I wanted to take home) and the fresh tomatoes she offered me out of her garden. The no knead bread dough, which has been no-kneading on my counter all week, will go into the oven when the pizzas exit. Followed by a batch of basil-infused chocolate chip cookies, a trade for produce with the wonderful ladies from Blue Moon Community Farm, our next door neighbors at the Farmers' Market. This is in part because they handed me the two bags of basil, the remnants of which must be used before turning brown, and in part because the weekly batch of ginger ale they enjoy is a bit off this week.

These weeks are a race to successfully (and tastefully) use all the ingredients in the fridge while they are still edible, to do them proper justice in a savory manner. This hasty competition makes me look forward to the days when the steam from the stove and heat from the oven will be a welcome addition to the stoking of the furnace...although that landscape is still (gratefully) months away. But for right now, I can sit on the porch, watch the dog bark in amazement at the claps of thunder overhead and enjoy the sound of the cooling rain. Until it's time to puree the borscht, that is.

So cheers, to the rush and satisfaction of the bountiful time of year, to the constant transition and to the joy of today's food in your fridge.