Midwest floods

Via Samuel Fromartz, Gretta Wing Miller has a short documentary about the flooding that has devastated vegetable growers in the upper Midwest (where I come from).

The best part: seeing how co-ops and natural food stores are helping out, promising to buy as much as they can of whatever the farms have left.

The worst part: when a flooding stream saturates the land with whatever it's carrying from upstream--in a region where you're never too far from industrial grain or diary farms--it raises questions about organic certification for the following year. Yet another example of how "organic" has become in many ways the opposite of what it was intended to be.

This whole situation is a reminder of the value of CSAs--by investing in the farm itself, you take part in its losses and its bounty alike, whether that means a whole box of extra peaches in July or helping absorb this sort of financial catastrophe.