As of March 1st 2008 this should no longer be a problem, so if you registered on or after this date, your registration should be okay. Only prior registrations that were still pending would be affected. We restored some, but there may be some we lost, so if you were not able to register let us know.

We want to apologize and make you aware we experienced a technical problem with our configuration that limited the activation expiration to about a day and half. We’re not sure what period this happened over.

If your activation message says it expires in 30 days but fails to activate, you will have to register again. We do have backup data for part of the period concerned, so we will contact the users who we do have pending registrations in backup and we believe may have encountered the problem. Otherwise, you should register again.

Feel free to contact us about the issue.

I am reading Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food. I had just reached the end of his forward when I was struck by one of the closing paragraphs, which says that eaters have real choices now thanks to the revival of local farms and farmer’s markets, which make practical the availability of whole foods. I had to stop, the words echoing in my mind, because they were incredibly resonant with what we are doing here at farmfoody.org, reminding us that our health, the health of the land, the health of our food culture are inextricably linked.

I continued my reading and came to the point where Pollan relates the story of dentist and amateur scientist Weston Price, who abandoned his practice to study the food culture and nutrition of various aboriginal peoples around the world, untouched by the Western diet. Price concluded the common denominator of health among these peoples was, as Pollan says “to eat a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients.” We believe that the survival of small, independent farms is dependent on leveraging their local characteristics, just as wine makers leverage terroir as as an argument for the uniqueness of their wines. It is not a stretch to believe, as Pollan does, that the richness of the soil has an influence on the nutritional richness of food. Price’s description mirrors that of the small, independent farm supplying the local area with food, which was common before the second world war.

Moreover, Pollan writes that Price believed that “by breaking the links among local soils, local foods, and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain.” I am not sure about the disruption of nutrients, but it is those broken links we wish to restore by making some new links of our own, linking local soils, local foods and local peoples together again through social networking.

As I turned the pages, I discovered another passage that resonated with our intuitions about linking together the land, food and people though locality, food and culture using the technology of the 21st century. In the latter half of In Defense of Food the author lays out rules of thumb for escaping the Western Diet, but before doing so, he observes that food does not consist of nutrients alone, but “comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.” We hope this is exactly what our website will do, create a web of social relationships reaching back to the land and to other people, through the farms and foodies, sharing their pictures and their recipes, a little bit of who they are with each other.

That is as far as I’ve got, but we hope to build, along with you, whether you grow food or eat food, a place that connects You to whole foods, real people and food culture, that enables you to create, sustain and nurture change in our food culture. In everything we do, we want to place people at the center, because we believe that health is a product of nurturing a set of relationships with food, the natural world and people.

New Features

We fixed a problem where street address was not being submitted with registration form. Some users may need to enter their street address through their profile. Please login and go to Edit Profile to add or correct your street address.

Also, you may see some differences in how personalized maps display friends until we have settled on a policy for the display of friends on maps.

Each year seems to bring its crop of food scandals.

“A California meat company on Sunday issued the largest beef recall in history, 143 million pounds, some of which was used in school lunch programs, Department of Agriculture officials announced.” reports the New York Times (Largest Recall of Ground Beef Is Ordered).

The recall has left the Grand Rapids school system sitting on ten tons of beef they cannot use.

What can consumers do to find safer sources of beef and more humane treatment of animals?

One answer is to purchase beef from small independent farms. These farms raise beef on grass and their animals do not require antibiotics like the animals raised in factory farms do. Beef is slaughtered in small, independent slaughterhouses using humane methods, where there is transparency.

Independent farms raise beef in small numbers. When large numbers of animals are kept together, there is a greater chance of spreading disease to their fellow animals. This is why at feedlots animals are medicated. On a small farm, there is less chance of a disease running through the animals. An independent slaughterhouse processes animals in small lots for individuals, creating less chance of spreading contamination nationwide.
The advantage of purchasing your meat from a local source is that you can look the butcher in the eye. You build a relationship with the butcher, the slaughterhouse and the farmer. You know your butcher, you know where you food comes from. It may cost more, but as Michael Pollan says, we should pay more (for better quality food) and eat less to be healthier.

Our site will be down for scheduled maintenance starting at 1:00 AM EST Saturday 16 Feb 2008 for about one hour. If problems arise, there may be further unscheduled periods.

Farmfoody.org now offers accounts for vineyards. We see vineyards as benefiting from social networking by helping organize and promote tasting events. To sign up as a vineyard, choose Vineyard for Account Type when signing up. Vineyard accounts are a variation on Farmer accounts, so you will see the standard farm related fields, such as Farm Name, etc.

To add your vineyard to our network, go to our Sign Up page.

The Union of Concerned Scientists news feed contained an interesting item stating Mid-sized and small farms are significantly more productive than large farms.

Mid-sized and small farms are more productive than large farms when measured by total farm output per acre rather than the yield of a single crop, according to a review of the literature published several years ago by the non-governmental organization Food First. Mid-sized farms were also found to be better stewards of natural resources. But a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture report found that commodity payments to support row crops such as corn, soybeans, and cotton go overwhelmingly to large operations that are pushing mid-sized and small farms out of business. The report also found that farms that receive commodity payments tend to grow even bigger. Currently, two percent of U.S. farms qualify as “small” (less than 50 acres), and 67 percent are considered “large” (1000 acres or more). Read the survey (pdf).

Read more at http://ucsaction.org/ct/n1Nitws1J4wQ/

This week we rolled out our recipe system. Now users with any account type can post and share recipes on their profile. Farmers can post recipes to help their customer prepare meals using their unique ingredients. Recipes are a natural for our chef users and everyone likes to share recipes.

Recipes reflect personality, and we believe they fit nicely into the social network paradigm.

To add a recipe, just sign in to your account and use the Add Recipe tool. To edit a recipe, go to the Manage Recipes page and click Edit. Recipes appear on your profile page along with your other content.

Tip: If you paste recipes from a word processor, sometimes it will use symbols for fractions. Our software sees characters out of the normal range as a security problem, so please replace fraction characters with text like “1/4″ or “1/2″ in your recipes.
Our co-founder Tom Davenport posted a couple of family recipes on his Hollin Farms profile.