Voices for the Land & People

Alerting, informing & calling to action – people of faith in defense of Creation

Vol. 4, No. 3 Published for the Tri-State in Middleton , Wis. Fall & Winter 2006

Gathering puts more hope for city and farm into action

• D evelopment
• I nvestment
• E nergy
• T axes
• S ecurity

D iets don’t have to mean turmoil and deprivation – unless we wait too long to act. This is true for communities and regions, as well as individuals. Our planet is too small for us to wait any longer for good local diets. If we care about loved ones, and ourselves we plan our diet. We develop strategies for healthcare. We use our time and money wisely. We’re firm about what we need, what our health needs. We respect our limitations, use our resources wisely, provide true food security. We call people of the tri-state to the 2007 Rural and Urban Life Gathering to rethink our collective “DIETS,” our Development, Investment, Energy, Taxes and Security. We convene our Aldo Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University .

Jack Kloppenburg , a UW Madison Professor of Rural Sociology; will give an overview of why local food systems are important and talk in detail about REAP, the Farm Fresh Atlas, the Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch farm-to-school program, the Food For Thought Festival, and our new Buy Fresh, Buy Local Jack Kloppenburg Campaign, all in Madison , Wis.He serves on the Madison Community Gardeners Coalition board; is secretary for REAP (Research, Education, Action and Policy on) Food Group board; serves on BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium project advisory panel; and is a Regent Market Cooperative board member in Madison. He authored the award-winning First The Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000, published in 1988 in New York by Cambridge University Press, for which he received the Agricultural History Society's Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award for best book on agricultural history in 1988; and Robert K. Merton Professional Award from the Science, Knowledge and Technology section, American Sociological Association in 1991. He is widely published and honors include 2000 Spitzer Excellence in Teaching Award, CALS-UW; 1998 Lightning Rod Award, Madison Community Gardeners Coalition; and a 1992-95 Pew Fellowship in Conservation and the Environment. Kloppenburg is affiliated with the Gaylord Nelson Institute, the Institute for Environmental Studies and UW Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems.

New film on climate change set for showing at Gathering
Churches’ Center for Land and People showed Canadian producer Karen Coshoff’s new film The Great Warming 11 times this past fall. About 275 people turned out for the showings. They donated $1,355 to help publicize the movie in theaters and to help CCLP connect local consumers with winter farmers’ market benefit sales. Every 1 mile of travel cut from the 2000 miles food typically travels keeps at least 1 lb. of carbon out of the atmosphere. 2007 Rural and Urban Life Gathering participants will view The Great Warming Thursday, Feb. 1, at Shalom Retreat Center in Dubuque . Call Tony Ends, 608 897-4288, scotchhillfarm@wekz.net about showing the film in your church.

Kendall Thu , a Northern Illinois University anthropological researcher, board member of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance and member of the Illinois FarmerConsumer Coalition, will speak on ways research can partner with the local public sector as agents of change. Thu is a cultural anthropologist with a strong interest in applied anthropology, food systems, public and environmental health. His research focuses on the relationships between industrialized food systems, the environment, public health, rural social dynamics, and state power and policy. He hasbeen Culture and Agriculture Section president of the American Anthropological Association, served on the Central States Anthropological Society executive board, and is a Society for Applied Anthropology Fellow.

Gathering with an invitation to people from both religious and secular walks of life. It’s an invitation to rethink relationships between food and all aspects of our lives, between farmers and consumers, between global issues and reasoned responses at home.

We invite our tri-state region to reflect on our diets. We ask you to pause for a night and a day to consider how faith and public communities can help meet contemporary challenges to develop, invest and power positive change. We seek as an outcome one or more working groups to shape regional security for better, local “DIETS.”

What’s at Stake? For too long, development has meant those outside our region exploit and profit off hard work, wealth and natural resources. For too long, we’ve invested, consumed in ways that bleed local economies.

 For too long, determining energy to warm us, power us, transport us has been left to people distant from where we live. Resulting policies have shackled us to fossil fuels and profit-driven directions with costly long-term outcomes.

Our taxes subsidize a future we know spells national and local vulnerability, even danger for generations to come. All means of food and fiber production are concentrated, centralized, large-scale, specialized. Essentials depend on transit across great distances and availability of non-renewable energy & fossil fuels.

Entrepreneurship, business ownership and enterprise are stifled. Economic efficiencies enrich a few in every aspect of life at the expense of long-term security and health for the many. They receive unfair priority in every aspect of planning and research. Thus, we feel powerless and vulnerable.

Finding our way together In recent past Gatherings, we acknowledged that we are the people we’ve been waiting for tobring about economic justice, earth stewardship, community and spirituality. At the start of 2007, we convene a new Gathering to build on these sessions, starting with food and farming. For dietary solutions that respect individual and collective health, we look within our locale.Our speakers pledge to help us rethink how to revitalize our communities, restore economic justice and provide health and food security.

Re-ordering priorities We must first ask the right questions:

• Why are we accepting poor quality, poor flavor, poor nutrition in what we buy and eat?
• Why are we letting annual incomes and taxes finance our own ruin and exploitation?
• Why aren’t we developing our own products from our own grain, meat, vegetable, fruit production?
• Why do we let buildings sit empty, business parks languish or serve outside interests, farms earn pennies on the dollar, urban consumers serve large companies outside our region?
• Why do we buy food for, schools, hospitals, employee cafeterias congregational meals, institutional food services and families from anonymous mass production and co-mingling of raw farm commodities that we cannot trust, that siphon wealth, that put security and health at risk?

• Why don’t we invest in ourselves, lobby for better uses of tax dollars, inventory and budget our resources – for local building materials, fiber production, food production, energy generation, and intermediate technology that places premiums on quality, local ownership and enterprise?

We can grow it better, make it better, cook it better, produce it better. We can serve it up fresher. We can monitor its costs to the ecology better. We can plan its long-term sustainability better – for ourselves, tourists, employees and communities. We can foster enterprise, revitalize trades and craftsmanship, profit from art and artisanship. This was how our nation became great. This is how all esteemed cultures nourish quality of life, feed the human spirit and inspire hope.

-Tony Ends, CCLP

“Hope in Action II” – Rural and Urban Life Gathering

Rethinking our tri-state region’s DIETS

Development, I nvestment, Energy, Taxes and Security

Thursday, Feb. 1

3 p.m. – Check-in and Exhibit Setup

4 p.m. Welcome – Patrick Lenane, Board President

Framing the Challenge & Introductions – Tony Ends, Director, CCLP

5 p.m. Dinner of Local and Regional Foods

6:30 p.m. Ken Meter Presentation – President of Crossroads Resource Center based in Minneapolis will show how economic analysis can motivate change in our communities and region

7:30 p.m. Film Showing – The Great Warming (85 minutes)

9 p.m. Social Hour and Informal Discussions

Friday, Feb. 10

7:30 a.m. – Check-in, coffee & continental OR hot breakfast (pre-register)

8:15 a.m. – Welcome, Introductions, Themes and Thanks

8:30 a.m. – Jack Kloppenburg Presentation - A UW Madison Professor of Rural Sociology; will give an overview of why local food systems are important and talk about REAP, the Farm Fresh Atlas, the Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch farm-to-school program, Food For Thought Festival, and our new Buy Fresh, Madison Buy Local Campaign

9:15 a.m. – Kendall Thu Presentation – Northern Illinois University anthropological researcher, Illinois Stewardship Alliance board member and Illinois Farmer Consumer Coalition, will speak on ways research can partner with local public sectors as agents of change

10 a.m. – Break

10:15 a.m. – Working Group Sessions with Presenters to Develop Regional Task Forces or Working Groups

Noon – Prayer and Feast : Celebration of Local and Regional Foods ( Meal and Harvest of Hope demonstration sale at Cathedral Center, Cathedral of St. Raphael, 231 Bluff St., Dubuque)

1:30 p.m. – Networking/Discussions continue at Cathedral in informal groups

11:30 to 4 p.m. – Harvest of Hope Winter Farmer’s Market Benefit Sale

Shalom Center can accommodate 77 overnight guests. Send Registration and payment by Monday, Jan. 29. Make checks payable to CCLP (Churches’ Center for Land and People). Late Overflow Registrants can get a reduced rate at the Julien Inn, 200 Main St. ($46.65 total). Register by Jan. 29. Hotel price does notinclude meals ( add $15). If 20 or more register at hotel, free shuttle is provided.

• Gathering Registration: $25
• At-door Registration add $5
• Individual Overnight (single room), dinner & Breakfast: $40
• Meals only: $17.50
• Late Registrant and Overflow hotel room $41.65 to $58.65 (depending on room size) +meals: $17.50 + registration

Questions, call Holly, 608 234-2696. Late Overflow Registration at Julien Inn, call Michelle, 563 556-4200.

PRE-REGISTRATION – Complete the form below, clip and mail with payment to Churches’ Center for Land and People, 4200 County Hwy M, Middleton , WI 53562 . Contact 608 897-4288 or scotchhillffarm@wekz.net

Gathering Location

Shalom Retreat Center

1001 Davis St. , Dubuque

563 582-3592 http://members.aol.com/DBQShalom/

“Hope in Action II”

Rural and Urban Life Gathering 2007 Registration

INDIVIDUAL/COUPLE: Name(s) & address:

____________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________

Phone: _____________________________________________________________________

Email: ______________________________________________________________________

GROUP: Please attach complete address, phone & contact details for all in your group.

Contact Person’s Information:

____________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________

Phone: _____________________________________________________________________

Email: ______________________________________________________________________

Mail to: Churches’ Center for Land and People, 4200 County Hwy M, Middleton, WI 53562

Scheduling just one sale at one church, inviting farmers to attend and seeking publicity to attract consumers can take 25 telephone calls, scores of emails, mailings and printings. This exceeds our ability to keep up with the benefit sales. Meeting a project budget to coordinate and promote sales is overwhelming. We issued an appeal for help.
Within 3 weeks of our bulk mailing to more than 2,000 people from 8 denominations in Illinois , Iowa and Wisconsin , scores of general donations from $5 to $200 came in from across the tri-state. One couple sent in a check – their 3rd in 4 years – for $2,000.
Gifts totaled more than 20 percent of the $29,000 goal we set to expand winter farmers’ market benefit sales for Harvest of Hope in Iowa and Wisconsin . A 16 th judicatory that had fallen away from supporting our center some years past also responded with a sponsorship renewal of $2,000.
A project with promise to increase justice, earth stewardship, community and spirituality for farming people was in the balance. Many of you acted quickly to help us benefit farmers in desperate circumstances. We’re not out of the water yet, but we’re still paddling to shore. You’ve renewed hope and commitment. You’ve kept our effort moving forward.

New sales are being added in Chicago, St. Benedict’s on Irving Park (Jan. 27), Epiphany Episcopal Church and a meeting of its diocese (Feb. 17), and United Methodist and Mennonite churches are looking for calendar dates.

You can still help our effort:

• Please send a donation if you have not already done so;
• If you still have the donation appeals letter from October, please pass it along to a friend. Write a note on the letter endorsing this work and acknowledging you’ve helped.
• Most important, please help get strong ecumenical and public turnouts for our farmers markets at the enclosed calendar.

We still face a huge responsibility to make up sudden reverses. If you want copies of our appeal, call or email me at 608 897-4288 scotchhillfarm@wekz.net. A strong grassroots response will lay the groundwork for larger foundation support within the year. Please help make this possible.

- Tony Ends, Director, CCLP

Child’s injury shows farmers market purpose

 A helicopter flies a boy, 7, hurt in a farm mower accident near Elizabeth, Ill., to UW Madison Children’s Hospital. His foot has to be amputated.
His mother, still recovering from cancer surgery, and his father, who farms 140 acres and works as a carpenter, are at his side. Two neighboring farmers are tending the family’s cows, finishing up corn harvests, watching the family’s other 5-year-old – all the while they tend their own chores.
For a nation 99 percent removed by generations from the farm, it all sounds too incredible to happen outside a TV drama. For young Kyle Ege, his parents Ron and Sherry, and neighbor Tom Arnold, all these events tragically unfolded from an accident that happened Nov. 24. Arnold sells his grass-fed beef at our winter farmers’ market benefit sales for Harvest of Hope emergency fund. He couldn’t attend our St. Benedict’s sale in Chicago because he was helping his neighbors, the Eges.
Harvest of Hope Fund, operated by Madison Christian Community since the 1980s farm crisis, has spawned a new safety net for farmers in Illinois and Iowa. The Ege family will be the first to receive help from this Illinois-Iowa Harvest of Hope Fund, through Churches’ Center for Land and People. Kyle’s healing rapidly and has returned home, where he’s getting about in a wheelchair.
His mother, herself a staff company nurse, is watching him until he can be fitted for prosthesis at Shriner Children’s Hospital in Chicago .

Farm vendors bring finished products from what they grow and raise – preserves, cheese, meat, eggs, goat milk soap, sorghum, maple syrup, honey – and sell directly to the public in the parish hall winter farmers markets. Six denominations in 42 sales this winter are taking part.

Farmers mark up their prices 10 percent for the day and donate the proceeds to the fund. Churches’ Center has been organizing the sales since December 2003. The Center is a licensed 501 (c)(3) non-profit. All farmers at the sales sign a farm vendor accord before participating. Farm vendors pay no fee, just donate to the fund.

The markets are completely open to the public. No religious affiliation is required. Anyone can participate, and there’s no admission. These markets help farm families increase their incomes. They provide for other farmers who face surgery without insurance, power cutoffs leaving livestock without water or augured feed, spring planting without enough money to buy seed.
In Wisconsin , Harvest of Hope fund has given away $727,030 to Wisconsin farm families in dire circumstances. The market project, started in 2003 contributed about 10 percent of the $31,000 that the fund has distributed to Wisconsin farmers this year. About ¾ of those gifts went to farmers whose power had been shut off or threatened with cutoff.
Giving cash gifts to farmers beset by emergency bills they cannot pay this year comes not a second too soon.

• Annual average net farm income after depreciation nationwide is only $7,000.
• USDA’s Economic Research Service forecasts total net farm income to be $56.2 billion in 2006, down from 2005 by $16.4 billion.
• The value of production this year is forecast to be down $2.6 billion for crops and $2.9 billion for livestock, a little over 2 percent for each.
• Government payments will decline $4.5 billion.
• Purchases of manufactured inputs are expected to rise by $2.6 billion due to higher fuel and fertilizer prices, with the latter resulting from high prices for natural gas.
• Expenditures for other purchased farm inputs this year are forecast to be up $2.2 billion, reflecting higher fuel prices, labor costs, and interest rates.
  All this follows 5 years of $7 billion or more in annual farm production cost increases, largely due to rising energy prices (for gasoline, propane, natural gas, oil and diesel fuel). Farm loan payments are forecast to be up $2.6 billion, led by rising interest on debt and higher labor costs. Farm debt now exceeds that of the peak 1980s farm crisis, when land values plummeted, and a crash drove half the farm population – 3 million farmers off their land in a single decade.
  A light shines in the parish halls of those 42 local churches. It is a solution to many problems we all face. Will you turn it on? Positive change always begins with a simple first step. Walk through that door near you and support local farmers, local systems of food production, local solutions.