This series comes from the HARVEST Public Media website and covers cultures, technology, sustainability, business, politics and other important aspects of today’s farmer.

Special Report: Farmer of the Future

This we know: You can’t feed the growing world population without farmers. But there are serious questions today about who will actually be able to take on the job a few decades from now. Farmers are getting older, yes, but technological, cultural and political forces also are bringing immense change to those people who commit to building their lives around the land. Read More...

From the inbox of Meyer’s outbox:

As any new mom or dad will tell you, a large portion of their “evolved” daily routine involves feeding the kidlets. First there is the attempt to make sure they are eating right by providing them with all the nutritious benefits of a well-balanced meal. If a child should ever conceive of other options like Captain Crunch for breakfast, then all your hard work steaming broccoli goes out the window. Then the battle lines are drawn between “clean your plate” versus “I’m not eating that.” Who surrenders first can alter the entire family dynamic. And that’s just for dinner. Perhaps another approach can be found in finding a way to get your kids connected to their food early on. Over in Connecticut there are several local family farms who are doing just that through a series of farm camp summer programs. Quite frankly, I’d like to sign up for farm camp!

INTRODUCING CHILDREN TO THE SOURCES OF FOOD

By Jan Ellen Spiegel writing for the NY Times

IN the waning days of last summer, Brie Casadei stood at the edge of several raised garden beds and pointed. “This huge plant, anyone know what it is?” she asked a dozen or so elementary-school-aged children around her.

Dead silence.

“That’s the basil,” she said, answering herself. “That’s what we’re going to use to make our pesto.”

That didn’t exactly clear things up; both the basil and pesto were new to nearly every child within earshot of Ms. Casadei on that buggy August morning. No surprise, perhaps, in an age in which computer-game-centric children think milk, eggs and potatoes come from a store. It is also why, in 2005, Ms. Casadei and her husband, Ethan Grimes, started their farm camp, Terra Firma.

“We had five kids,” Ms. Casadei said of their first two-week trial camp.

Now with the winds of the local food movement, food safety concerns, out-of-control obesity and outcry over things like “pink slime” at its back, Terra Firma has several hundred summer campers, ages 3 through 12, many coming for multiple weeks across a nine-week summer season. Such popularity adds to the evidence that interest is growing in farm camps in Connecticut. There are about half a dozen such camps, up from just a couple that languished for years before the recent spike in interest. Read More...

The last time I was in Indianapolis was the summer of 2003. I remember it pretty well because I was still sulking about The Colts being moved there without my permission and not quite over their inglorious departure from my hometown of Baltimore twenty years earlier. My bitterness melted away however in nearby Plainfield at The National Chimney Sweep Training School, the site of my very first Dirty Job. There, I was instructed in the fine art of “flue maintenance,” and engulfed in flames while attempting to extinguish a raging creosote fire from the top of a rickety demonstration platform. Things went downhill after that and by the time I finally left town I was unrecognizable, concealed under a thick layer of ash and soot, with no plans of ever returning to The Crossroads of America.

Of course, in those days I was unrecognizable on a daily basis. Dirty Jobs would not debut for another six months, and I had no reason to think that anyone would watch when it did. I was wrong about that, and I’ve been wrong about a great many things ever since. A few months ago in fact - proving once again that my plans and my life have little in common – I returned to Indianapolis a lot cleaner, and a lot less anonymous, to deliver the keynote address at The 82nd National Convention of The Future Farmers of America (10/21/09).

For those of you who don’t know, The FFA is an organization of 500,000 teenagers, most of who look like they fell off the front of a Wheaties box. Wholesome, polite, and impossibly well mannered, these are the kids you wish you had, diligently pursuing an adolescence of agricultural acumen. Unfortunately, I arrived at their annual convention with the same level of planning and forethought I brought on my last visit, (i.e., none,) and found myself pacing in the wings twenty minutes before my appearance, trying to arrange my thoughts into an “inspirational and G-Rated message.” Luckily, I happened to glance down at the “FFA Briefing Packet,” recently handed to me by one of the organizers, and found some inspiration on page 4. Read More...