But whether our state is better off when all children have enough to eat?
We know the answer to that.
But whether our state is better off when all children have enough to eat?
We know the answer to that.
As a mom, farmer, and business strategist, I’m in favor of making sure there’s food at school for all of my kid’s classmates.
And as we turn around our farm sector, we can also get more of that food from right here in NC: shortening supply chains, building rural opportunity, and strengthening our state’s economy for all of us.
https://mailchi.mp/taberfornc/a-food-manufacturing-renaissance-is-needed-in-north-carolina
In the US, there's been a lot of talk & concern about foreign investors buying up US farmland.
And there is, in fact, a tech startup that helps them do that! It's like Robin Hood for buying US farmland.
And who's one of its key investors, profiting off of every sale?
J.D. Vance.
Who Trump recently chose as his VP to "represent rural America."
Y'all know what day it is 🍀
In the US, St. Patrick's Day is strongly tied to the event that led so many Irish people to emigrate here: the famine of 1847.
Food systems & supply chains make history.
And we're off!
1/ Ireland has a long history of smallish cattle. Here's a guy posing with a bull, with some forced perspective to make this compact king look like full-sized.
Why small cows? They weigh less.
That's a big plus in Ireland. When it's rainy, big heavy cows can easily tear up sod with their weight. Next thing you know the pasture is a music festival-style mudpit. The grass can take years to grow back right.
You can avoid all of that just by having smaller cows!
So today we're doing another round!
For every donation to the link below, I'll post one (1) fact about agriculture in Ireland- before, during, & after 1847.
There's WAY more than potatoes. Like what's going on with these fully-grown, halfling-sized cows.
I'm working to build a better food system here in the southern US. Both regions share rich land that can grow plenty of good food- and a history of deep rural poverty, thanks to what could generously be described as "poor leadership."
There's also a lot of ingenuity in both.
4/ There's a song about colcannon! Fittingly called "Colcannon."
It's a little sappy but I think for a thing that stood between a lot of people & starvation, this is permissible.
3/ If you're eating a lot of potatoes & dairy, you gotta find a way to make it interesting!
Enter colcannon: mashed potatoes with greens and ideally (IMO) as much milk/butter as possible.
2/ This answers a question I'd had for a long time. When we learned about the 1847 famine in schools, the textbooks would say "People got almost all their calories from potatoes, and their fat and protein from a little bit of dairy." But I knew cows are big honkin' animals that need lots of space and food.
If people were living on tiny plots, how were they keeping cows?
Oh the cows were little. That helps a lot.
5/ After emigrating to the US, a lot of people kept using colcannon as a side dish along with corned beef (a working-class friendly main dish in 19th century US) or other heartier options.
But for people living on small plots in Ireland, it often served as the main dish.
7/ But there's a problem: dairy is perishable. Hard aged cheeses have a longer shelf life. But those take dry conditions (part of why they're popular in the Mediterranean).
What's a dairy farmer in cold, rainy Ireland to do?
Bog butter, apparently!
6/ What did people in Ireland eat before potatoes?
By all accounts, lots & LOTS of dairy. The weather's good for growing lush grass, which keeps cows well-fed enough to milk most of the year.
Drinkable yogurt-type beverages, curds, clabbered cream, and lots & lots of butter.
Dinner break! Keep 'em coming folks, will be back with more farm & food system facts shortly.
8/ Starch came from oats- the grain most tolerant to wet weather- and root crops like turnips.
Ireland's food history didn't start with the potato! Potatoes arrived into a food system that had already been fully formed since the Bronze Age.
9/ Potatoes arrived from the Americas in the late 1500s/early 1600s.
And that was right around when England began seizing large amounts of land to set up plantations. (In Ireland, plantations = land grants the monarch gave to English gentry.)
12/ At the same time, grain was having an export boom because of the Napoleonic Wars.
France, which was normally a grain powerhouse, was short on both labor and functional farmland to grow grain.
Suddenly, anyone who owned large acreage could make lots of money exporting grain.
11/ But by 1815, a few things had changed.
The population of Ireland skyrocketed from 1M in 1600 to 8M in 1840.
The super-high yield/acre of potatoes had a lot to do with it: adding the potato to Ireland's crop mix just allowed the land to support more people.
The population boom, combined with the grain export boom, pushed Irish tenants' personal plots to minuscule size.
By 1845 40% of Irish tenant farmers' plots were under 15 acres per family. 24% were under 2 hectares- which WOW, is NOT enough to support a family. AT ALL.
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