Digital Horizons

Digital Horizons

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Bioneers by the Bay Conference

Bruni's Blog

On October 24^th & 25^thAndy Margon (one of our staff), Tariq Alexis (one of our youth participants), and myself, Bruni Torras (Added Value Farmer), went on a trip to New Bedford, Massachussets to attend the Bioneers by the Bay Conference. It turned out to be a fun, exciting and inspiring experience. We weren’t able to attend the whole conference, but in the short time we were there we each attended two different workshops, listened to a number of inspiring keynote addresses, and even got to practice some artistic skills by spray-painting on T-shirts!

Bioneers by the Bay (a satellite of the annual Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California) is a conference about the environment with workshops on a wide range of topics that fall under this topic. Being a farmer at Added Value, I really enjoyed listening to Derek Christianson at the workshop I went to on Green Careers. He is an organic farmer in upstate NY, and started his talk by asking who in the room was a farmer. Later he said that that percentage of our population, which right now is very small, is going to be growing a lot. My highlight, though, was listening to Eliot Coleman (author of The New Organic Farmer) when he gave his keynote address and talked to us about organic agriculture and sustainability. He said that successful organic farming is not about having the right products, but about using appropriate systems and methods that work with, and imitate nature. He was talking about things like composting, rotating crops with cover crops, and even using animals in the rotation to “harvest” and fertilize the field. (These systems also create less waste and require less work). He was very inspiring to me!

Tariq's Blog

My name is Tariq Alexis and the name of the workshop I went to was green chemistry the reason I went to this workshop because I want to learn more things about science. from going to this workshop I learned that we need to use more solar power instead of gas or oil because it is causing pollution and global warming in the air. The most interesting things I learned are that a river can set on the on fire because there are a lot chemicals in the water, and how you can draw solar power from a metal plate and light. This is a picture of Andy and I putting iodine on a metal plate to draw solar power from light. This is the type of science I want to know more about when I get into college. My thoughts from this workshop were that I want to know the next new thing that's going to come out and how can I make it. For example, I want to know how to make cars run on electricity and how to make them levitate.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Harvest Festival 08 - Malcom's Blog

My favorite part of the Harvest Festival was giving tours. I was very nervous and scared that I might mess up until my best buddy came to help me out. I felt bad to be using my friend to do something I couldn’t succeed at but he was not scared at all. There was a group of 1st and 2nd graders and about 6 adults on the tour and they all had fun. They enjoyed when I jumped into the compost. I'm proud that I overcame my fears and got to lead the tours. This was the best Harvest Festival ever.

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Harvest Festival 08- Tariq's Blog

My experience at the Harvest Festival was a good one but my tours went bad for me because I didn't get enough practice for them. So I think I slacked off because I couldn't really explain everything on the Farm that well. Other than that I think it went pretty well. This relates to our goals because if we make our tours better we will be better as a team.

Harvest Festival 2008 - Aseel's Blog

Hello my name is Aseel Alwaqza. I am a youth participant here at Added Value. Recently we just had a Harvest festival on October 18 2008. My best experience at the Harvest festival was giving tours. I had the job of welcoming big groups of people and teaching them about the Red Hook Community Farm. Before the harvest festival, me and my co-workers all worked on making organizational goals. One of these goals was to try to get people together and educate them about the farm and how it is run. While I was giving these tours I felt like I accomplished this goal because people would gather up in groups of 20,

30, or even 40 just to get a tour. I felt that these people did learn something from my tours like the way that our composting system is run or how our beds were made. I was very happy to give tours at the Harvest festival because I achieved one of the organizational goals and still had fun.
(Image: Aseel and Malcom giving tours.)

Harvest Festival 08 - Nickeisha's Blog

On 10/18/08 AV had a harvest festival. I was very excited. I kept hearing about the many people and fun games that were going to be there. I did not think I was going to have as much fun as I did. One thing I enjoyed the most was that I met many new people and things went so smoothly. I was happy that I was able to do my job and also have fun doing it at the same time. I was kind of surprised.

At the harvest festival there were food and games that we don’t usually see on the farm. Such as meat, soup, the pumpkin carving and the apple game. I can say that it was one of the most fun events that has happened on the farm since I have been there. I think we accomplished all of our organizational goals such as enjoying ourselves and and making the community grow. We grow by trying new things and meeting new people. BY: Nickeisha Hayden

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Harvest Festival 2008 Vanessa's Blog

Hi my name is Vanessa Nimblett. I am a youth participant at Added

Value and this is my first year. That being said the recent harvest festival was also my first. My experience as a first timer was excellent, because I had a great time. I say that because I got to work and have fun. Every task that I had, I enjoyed. But my favorite task was the info/selling t-shirts booth. I got to interact with customers while enjoying the view and the music. Also while having fun, we caught every aspect of our organizational goals that we created as a group. So I think my experience related to our goals because we got to GROW as a team. Also, because we got to deal with the community more hands-on than usual. Last but not least, because we worked together and did the best we could and this is why I loved my experience as a first timer at the HARVEST FESTIVAL 2008!

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Added Value Tours Farm Projects at the Community Food Security Coalition Conference in Philadelphia

My name is Tariq Alexis. I'm a Youth Participant at Added Value. On Saturday, October 4, 2008, Added Value went to Philly to learn about farms there and to learn about how we can make our farm better. We got there by taking a van all the way to Philly, then splitting up into three separate groups and went on three separate tours: The North Philly Rennaisance, the West Philly bike tour, and New Jersey Farm-to-School and Farm-to-Business.

The one I went on was the West Philly Bike Tour. We were riding around Philly and looking at other Farms and seeing how we could get ideas from them. What I saw at one farm that interested me was this plant mugwort. The reason I liked it is because it helps you have colorful dreams and helps you sleep better. At one farm I went to in Philly, it had alot of pathways that we could walk through. I think that we should have better pathways on our farm, so that people won't step on our plants and mess up our crops.

This is my first time seeing other urban farms. I like how some of their farms are set up and I think that we should take some of their ideas to make our farms better.

My name is Phil Shipman and I'm the coordinator of the Digital Horizons program here at Added Value. Our teens are preparing to give tours of Red Hook Community Farm for the Harvest Festival, so on this trip not only did we see interesting farm projects, we also saw examples of how organizations give tours. This way we could take some knowledge of how to give a good tour back to Red Hook.

My tour was called North Philadelphia Rennaisance. We went to Teens 4 Good, where teenagers grow produce and sell it to local restaurants. Going to Greensgrow Farms was also very interesting. They grow on top of cement - on a capped brownfield. They use hydroponics, which is really interesting to me, because maybe it can be used on rooftops. We also had an amazing tour and Puerto Rican lunch at Las Parcelas Gardens. The lunch was made by the womens' empowerment group, Grupo Motivos. They had a traditional Puerto Rican house on their garden site! I liked seeing how they quite literally built a connection between culture and food into their garden. Cultural connections with food really interest me and I would like to see this explored more at Red Hook Community Farm.

Besides giving us all a chance to see how different projects do things, I think this was also a good first step towards our teens giving great tours of the Farm. Thanks everyone in Philly and at the CFSC for a great day.

My name is Nickeisha Hayden. On Saturday, October 4th, 2008, we, Added Value's Youth Participants, went on some tours in Philadelphia. Like Phil, I also went on the North Philly Rennaissance tour. At the Teens 4 Good farm, it reminded me very much of our farm in Red Hook. One thing I noticed is that all the farms had a story about themselves, such as how they started, and what they grown to become, like our farm. At the Las Parcelas garden, they were all about culture. I thought that maybe we should try to study different cultures and see what we can bring to the farm, such as stories, activities, and food from cultures all around the world.