Cider Pre-Order by Jan. 10!

**Cider Pressing**
Pre-order cider for pick up next week, during store hours, or by appointment. $7/half gallon - use within 2-3 weeks, or freeze for long-term keeping. Pre-order by Friday, January 10.

Pick up during store hours - W/Th 4-7, F/Sat 9-12 - or by appointment. A limited amount will be available for sale at the store as well.

Straight, fresh, clean raw cider - no preservatives. Drink fresh, make popsicles for the littles, make your own hard cider, mix an adult beverage and more. Keeps long-term in the freezer.

Pre-orders help us know how much to press! We will be pressing next weekend, so please order by Friday - comment below, message, text Brooke at 507-412-7605, or email info@alternativerootsfarm.com

This will be one of our final, or maybe our final pressing, not sure! 

2019 Dirty Dozen//Clean Fifteen

It's time to print off a new Dirty Dozen/Clean Fifteen card for your wallet! This fantastic, quick and easy, guide offers a great reference where best to spend your organic grocery dollars, if you aren't able to go all in on organics (like most families on a budget).

Click over and Get the Guide

The Dirty Dozen is a list of the most highly contaminated fruits and veggies - buying these items organic is a higher priority, if you are working to keep your diet clean.

We are proud to bring you organic apples, as they are always a high-ranking item on the Dirty Dozen list. This year apples rank #5, alongside a couple other A.R.F. specialties kale (#3) and tomatoes (#10).

Apples

"Apples are generally near the top of EWG’s Dirty Dozen™ list because they contain an average of 4.4 pesticide residues, including some at high concentrations..."

"...most conventionally grown apples are drenched in diphenylamine, an antioxidant chemical treatment used to prevent the skin of apples in cold storage from developing brown or black patches..."

"The European officials' concerns center on the possible formation of nitrosamines on diphenylamine-treated fruit. Nitrosamines cause cancer in laboratory animals, and some studies have found that people who eat foods with nitrosamines have elevated rates of stomach and esophageal cancers."

Kale

"More Than Half of Kale Samples Tainted by Possibly Cancer-Causing Pesticide"

"Conventional kale farming relies heavily on the use of several synthetic pesticides, including Dacthal. The EPA’s 1995 classification of it as a possible carcinogen noted increases in liver and thyroid tumors. Dacthal can also cause other kinds of harm to the lungs, liver, kidney and thyroid."

Go Organic

We are proud to bring you clean-eating, local organic produce. We believe it is the best thing for a healthy lifestyle and a healthy environment. Reseach supports this.

"A French study published in December in JAMA Internal Medicine, a journal from the American Medical Association, found that among nearly 69,000 participants, those with the highest frequency of organic food consumption had 25 percent fewer cancers than individuals who did not eat organic food."

"...the most recent of several studies evaluating the impact of an organic diet found that after only six days of eating organic food, adults and children had on average a 60 percent reduction in the levels of synthetic pesticides measured in their urine..."

Read the full report

Making a Blessing out of Fighting

Eternal mud season. That's what it feels like. Sometimes it seems like we are always fighting. Fighting the mud, the wind, the weather. Fighting time. Daylight. Sneaky chickens. Fighting for organic. Fighting the consumer mindset. Fighting for environmental and good food education. Time. Fighting bugs, disease, loss. Fighting to meet our sales goals. Fighting off exhaustion.

Right now the mud is a downer and it exacerbates this feeling, so pig chores became a meditation on fighting today. As I wrangled the kids hay rack out of one mud pit and into theirs I could feel the frustration (and triumph). (Fighting that fleeting thought that I just want to turn everyone into bacon!) The kiddos were delighted, grateful, exuberant over their alfalfa hay - my heart is full.

Hogs enjoying some good hay, despite the mud.

It's difficult to remind myself that it is a blessing to be able to fight these things, fight for these things. (I'll have to remember this in summer, when I'm trying to sleep with rain and 40 mph winds.) To have choice in these elements I'm fighting, and fighting for. Farming will never be easy, there will always be something to fight against, but we remain vibrant, grow strong.

We have the privilege not to have to be fighting for our livelihood. When there are others out there fighting for their homes, their lands, their water (our lands, our water), who have much less choice.

I think about the mud - the water in our ground. I am grateful that my family, my farm, my farm animals have access to good, clean water. The mud makes me crazy, but it's Minnesota...hopefully it will freeze soon. "This too shall pass." Meditating on gratitude that this is a temporary fight.

Mucking it up with my muddy buddies.

We stand with Standing Rock. We have to keep fighting for our environment, for our children for the next seven generations. We cannot give on this, but keep pressing forwards - each of us where we can.


The Seventh Generation Principle
"This principle states that we should make decisions about how we live today based on how our decisions will impact the future seven generations. We must be good caretakers of the earth, not simply for ourselves, but for those who will inherit the earth, and the results of our decisions. This value is found in the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Great Law of Peace (Gayanashagowa) and is common among a number of indigenous peoples in the Americas." - Woodbine Ecology Center

Don't Panic, We're Organic!

Grow Organic

Another year, a new organic certificate and inspection passed with flying colors and no changes needed. It feels good to be an organic producer.

At Alternative Roots Farm we believe that the right way to grow produce for our community is to grow organic. We never questioned this. There are arguments we hear, floating around the farming community, against this step, but they just aren't convincing to us to skip something so vital. The organic label is assurance to our customers that there are no synthetic chemicals on the food they are eating, we are caring for our land with organic management (crop rotation, organic matter, wildlife habitat) and no GMO crops are grown.

It is the only label that has solid, regulatory weight behind it that consumers can trust there are no chemicals and GMOs used. Many other claims, such as "natural" and "beyond organic," do not have any regulation for them. In a society where folks are hopping on the sustainability bandwagon, there is so much greenwashing of products it can be confusing when making purchasing decisions - organic eliminates this confusion.

ARF has been certified organic since August 2014.

Now, there are still ways organic could improve, but I feel it is a solid, trustworthy label for produce and produce products, while improvements for animal products are needed (in my opinion). When it comes to meat and eggs I would continue to use a skeptical eye and try to learn about your farmers and farms the products come from - buy local. "Access to pasture" is not the same as actually being out on pasture. With any good thing, such as a growing organic industry, there are going to be businesses that take advantage where there are profits to be made.

A Peek at the Certification Process

That brings me to the certification process behind organics. Each year, every organic operation - whether a grower, or processing facility - an organic business must work with their certification agency to apply annually for renewed certification. Then a third party, independent inspection agent makes a farm visit to verify paperwork, after which they report back to the certification agency, who reviews the report and makes a final determination of organic status. 

Certified organic by the Midwest Organic Services Association.

Paperwork and records are reviewed. Seed tags and bags and catalogs are saved for 5 years of accountability. Harvest data is checked to jive with what we are growing, to make sure folks aren't buying in and calling stuff organic that isn't. Seed to sale the inspector wants to be able to trace a product, for validity. What that looks like is our inspector, pulling out a sales receipt and having me trace that back to when and where it was harvested. There are various other paper trail details like this.

Arguments Against Organic

So, why do fellow farmer folks argue against organic? 

"The paperwork." Well, yes, there is paperwork, but in essence this is paperwork you want to do to be a good farmer, or business person, anyways. It's a little more work the first year of certification, then easy review and updating following that. 

"The Man." Yes, it is the government, and government regulations, which sometimes seem ass-backwards, but it's the way it is - deal with it. I file some paperwork, legally, federally filed paperwork that acts as a great insurance to our business and then I get to farm how I want. The government is not running my operation. I rotate crops on my schedule, plant the seeds that I want. Big Brother is never a presence on our farm.

There are other arguments, but these tend to be the main ones. I get frustrated by farms marketing as "Beyond Organic" which has no basis and confuses the organic name, confuses consumers we work so hard to educate and, frankly, is illegal. There are those that say we should not have to apply to not use chemicals, it's the conventional farmers that should apply to use chemicals (so much truth to that), but again...this is the way it is.

The hoops are worth jumping through for you, for our community, for education on real food. This isn't just about our farm, it's about our countries broken food system as well. It's as much a political statement as it is a small business decision.

Buy organic, support organic. For sustainable farms and food and future.