000 – Welcome to Farm-A-Yard

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000 – Welcome to Farm-A-Yard

with co-founders Linda Borghi and Criss Ittermann

Farm-A-Yard Podcast — It’s a movement… have ya heard?

We are serious about turning the 48.5 million acres of lawn in America into food production! Farm-A-Yard: It’s a movement… have ya heard? Linda Borghi and Criss Ittermann, two of the co-founders of Farm-a-Yard, share about the birth of the Farm-A-yard movement as a response to the challenges of soil degradation and food insecurity issues facing our country and the world.

You’ll notice in this episode that Farm-A-Yard is all about solutions, sprinkled with plenty of laughter and gratitude to pave the way for sustainable, lasting change.

This podcast is made possible by funding by our Patreon supporters.

For extra free content or to become a patron please see us at https://www.patreon.com/FarmAYard

Do you have the courage to walk out your door and rip up your lawn? Make a plan!

Just because you are on this website is evidence enough that you’ve got what it takes to grow you’re own food.

It’s a smart brave move on your part to take control of your food and where it comes from. To know that it’s safe and truly nutritious.

Join the ranks of the grassroots garden renegades that are popping up everywhere! When we grow food, we are making an impact on our health, the community, the environment and helping to localize our food system for food security. AND yard farming can be a real income generator.

If you are serious about growing food, this is the place! It pays to get started learning everything you can so that you can have the success you’re looking for sooner than later.

WARNING….once you get started you’ll be hooked.

Record numbers of people are growing food in pots in the window, on the patio, plots in the backyard, front yard, curb sites, public parks, schools, businesses…food can grow almost anywhere!

Where do you want to grow?

Here’s what you need first: Make a Plan and Get Organized

Evaluate your life and what time you can make available for the project.
Plan for the size garden you can realistically manage.
Assess your growing space options. Make sure you consider:
- Do you have permission to use the space? Short or Long Term?
- Does the area have at least 6-8 hrs. of sunlight daily? Make a sun map (google “sun mapping”)
- Does it have a safe, convenient water source?
- Will it need fencing to minimized wild life distrubance?
- Get a calendar to use just for the garden to schedule your plan.
- Get a folder or large manila envelope so you can attach receipts for all your garden seed, tools, investments. You can record and date each oneon the outside of the envelope. Data is important and will help you get the most from your garden adventure with less waste and cost. Attach pages that keep track of garden notes, like: Garden map plan, yields, pest problems, budget…
Equipped with the right information you can get to your goal much faster than most. This planning can help you save money too!

We’re with you every step of the way, so get on the Farm-A-Yard email list so that you don’t miss the announcement of our next FREE course. (check your spam folder too to make sure out emails are not getting lost!)

Click Here to Subscribe

December 14, 2016January 10, 2017

A Personal Food Revolution

We at Farm-A-Yard invite you to take action for a personal food revolution.

So what does a personal food revolution look like?

For some people it means becoming a more conscience mindful eater. Learning to listen to their body and noting how different foods affect their energy, positively or negatively and whether they get bloated or have joint pain, etc. They take note of the kind of relationship they have with food and if that is working for them.

For others it’s about making mindful choices of where their food comes from. Is good food accessible to everyone in their community? How was it was grown or raised? Mindfulness like this along with a desire to support a local economy and local farmers who are fair and mindful also of good working conditions for their farm workers.

The ultimate personal revolution for me, is learning to grow my own food, getting back in touch with the vibrant life force of the earth and learn from the quiet, invisible, dynamic wisdom under my feet.

It’s important to me to learn how to best grow my own chemical free food in a way that nurtures and supports the earth that is feeding me.

So why else is this so important?

Our nation’s health crisis is not joke. We’re the top country in the world for chronic diseases, obesity and diabetes.

So, what is the reason? It is widely accepted that it has everything to do what we are eating and drinking, the drugs people are taking and generally the soup of environmental toxins surrounding us, not to mention the impact of other life stressors and anxieties.

Our healthcare system today is more accurately described as being focused on the management of “sick care”, not “healthcare”. We spend billions of dollars to try and find “cures” (and the crisis has only worsened), but we continue to lack getting to the “root” of the problem and only treat sympthoms.

We have to trace it back to our management of our soil and water, on which our very existence depends. If we don’t get that right, then all our other efforts, though they are vitally important to the overall solution, all will be in vain because without healthy soil, nothing can be sustainable.

That is why I made the decision, as an urban farmer, to grow BioEnergetically/Biodynamically. Though I have grown without pesticides and herbicides, and chemical fertilizers, it’s not enough for the poor lifeless dirt that is the norm in America. The soil organisms need to be fed.

Biodynamic farming actually farms the soil, the air and even people. The Biodynamic preparations are food for the microbes in the soil and the whole eco environment. The human gut and inner ecosystem is a mirror of the soil web. Our life depends on the health of the invisible microbota of the earth and our connection to it.

So, this is what takes our educational webinars to another level. Get on our mailing list for more information, you’ll be glad you did.

December 12, 2016

Linda Borghi Speaks at Cultivating Profits in Small Scale Farming Conference

Raise your hand if you plan to dig up some of your lawn and

grow yourself some food.

Linda Borghi was challenging all the attendees at the Cultivating Profits in Small Scale Farming Conference at Fayetteville State University in Fayetteville, NC, to do just that!

Linda and I believe that the good food movement needs to be fun and like many things also needs a jingle and so at the end of the presentation Linda and Marsha, with ukulele in hand, shared the Farm-A-Yard song for a sing-along with the attendees! And a one and a two…..

Farm-A-Yard Song

Tune: Battle Hymn of the Republic

Farm-A-Yard it’s a movement

Have ya heard, have ya heard?

Turning lawns into food

Spread the word, spread the word

Make some cash

Ditch the grass

Feed yourself, feed the world

Farm-A-Yard it’s a movement

Have ya heard, have ya heard?

Yard to table

We are able

It’s the food that needs no label

Be a Farmer in your own backyard

Start today it’s a movement

Have ya heard, have ya heard?

Farm-A-Yard is a movement to equip folks to grow food to feed their families and even show you how to make an income part-time or full time. Our nation has a bad habit of wasting resources on the 48 million acres of lawn in this country which is depleting our precious water resources and adding tons of toxic chemicals that are polluting the environment…and for what?

We’re out to change that in a big way!

Farm-A-Yard is localizing our food system one yard at a time.

Farm-A-Yard it’s a movement, have ya heard? Join the movement, spread the word!

In the New Year, Farm-a-Yard will continue to bring its educational webinars that lay out the step by step basic skills necessary to Farm-a-Yard Biodynamically with a proven business model that shows you how to cultivate sustainable profits and so much more!

You don’t even have to own land.

Linda Borghi and Evan Folds make a truly Biodynamic team to bring all the pieces together for anyone looking to be successful in growing food for their family or to generate a viable, sustainable income.

Do you want to learn how to transform your soil for results that will blow your mind? All life hinges on the health of our soil.

We’ve got the “dirt cure” that takes the guesswork out

of how to regenerate the soil.

This information is revolutionary!

You’ll never look at the soil in the same way again!

You can check out some amazing info at www.microbemakers.com.

Get on our email list to learn more

www.farm-a-yard.com

September 24, 2016February 6, 2017

What is Real Food Security?

Being new to South Carolina everything is very interesting. I am aware of the sounds, the light… the sensations that are all around me, because it’s all new to me.

I am at a stage in my life that I have developed very keen observation skills and my most current observation has been my state of uneasiness because I did not have any food security. This is the first time in 16 years that I did not have any food growing outside my kitchen door. What a creepy feeling it is….unsettling at the very least.

Arriving in South Carolina the beginning of May did not give me enough time to create a yard farm before the “Heat of the Year” arrived. At one point during the summer the degrees on my car dashboard read 117…..whoa baby…hotter than anything other than watermelons wanted it to be!

I had to experience all summer long that creepy feeling due to my lack of food security. From May until the end of September…nearly 5 months, long enough to know how that feels.

Now that feeling is dissipating,. Why, because my beds are made, my plan is drawn and some seed is in the ground. When I see some germination the feeling will dissipate more and when I harvest I’m sure it will vanish the feeling completely!

That got me thinking about those who have never had food security. They do not experience those feelings but I am sure that if they were given 16 years of food security right outside their kitchen door and then not have that for five months…they would have a creepy feeling as well.

The moral of the story is this: Farm-a-Yard….it’s a Movement ….have ya heard?

September 21, 2016February 6, 2017

Why Farm-A-Yard? Background Story

I couldn’t help myself…..I never considered myself an activist, but when the pieces started coming together about why we are in such a health crisis in this country, my hair was on fire! What we now know is only the tip of the iceberg and Titanic is going down, while some are still playing the music and saying that everything is ok.

Sometimes I feel a little bit like Noah, who day by day spent his time building an Ark even though it had never rained before. Though he looked silly to others, he kept on building. We need to build local food systems for real food security and to do that we need to build local food chains of small farmers, yard farmers other food entrepreneurs.

Commercial food is seriously altered, highly processed, lacking in nutrients and even produce is laden with chemicals. We have also been in a huge GMO experiment without our consent, which starting in the 90’s.

So, being that I am the kind of person who can’t just sit around complaining and lament the problem, I literally “dug” in to be a part of the solution.

I was compelled to establish a Sustainable Neighbors meetup group in 2012, right after I moved from California and discovered how difficult it was to access locally grown, chemical free food in Fayetteville, NC.

In my search for healthy, locally produced food, there came another discovery… I found very few local small farmers actually growing their own produce to sell directly to the consumer. To add to this concern, I could not find a farmer who was not treating their land and crops with commercial fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides.

I recognized that all the processed foods being consumed and the lack of access to healthy produce was the main factor in the widespread health disparities in food deserts around the country.

I told myself that it didn’t have to be this way! My driving force now is to see people eat well and get well.

I have been observing the evolution of the food system for a long time and I am old enough to know what real food is and tastes like. I began to feel the urgency, for the sake of my grandchildren AND everyone’s grandchildren, to share the knowledge and skills of how to grow, preserve, cook from scratch and share other sustainable living skills and resources. Because of this, Sustainable Neighbors Meetup was born. www.meetup.com/sustainableneighbors www.sustainableneighborsnc.com

I was excited and inspired by the growth of the urban agriculture movement in cities around the country. We can do this and there is an opportunity to earn money too. This is how to be sustainable and it offers entrepreneurship opportunities to create jobs.

With other concerned neighbors and a vision to build resilient neighborhoods and communities, we began working to find farmers and educate and connect consumers to where their food comes from. When I met Linda Borghi, Biodynamic/Farmer in 2015 and we joined forces to launch the Farm-A-Yard movement with Evan Folds of www.MicrobeMakers.com and Melissa Jones of www.FromScratchMag.com to teach others how to turn lawns into food across the country.

We are collaborating with many who, like us, are also passionate to be the change they want to see in the world starting with their yard.

In the Farm-A-Yard course, our students learn critical keys to success from experts in the field. BioEnergetics is vital for soil regeneration and recovering the nutritional value of the plants we grow. Students can get an in depth soil test so that they know exactly what to do to for their soil. Students also are given cutting edge marketing and recordkeeping tools that save time and money. Everything you need in one awesome package with step by step instructions.

We all have the ability to make our communities food secure, By voting with our dollars (https://slowmoneync.org/), supporting local small farmers and/or learning to grow and preserve food for ourselves, you can be part of the movement.

IT’S A MOVEMENT, HAVE YOU HEARD?

Training Yard Farmers, Recruiting Yards

About Marsha Howe

Sustainable Neighbors and the Farm-A-Yard grassroots projects were born out of the concern around the eroding of our health through toxic processed foods, the lack of access to fresh, local, seasonal produce as well as the need to build local food systems for real food security. As Director of Food Education with Guiding Wellness Institute, Marsha facilitates urban farming/local food education and training to secure and sustain local food access and economic opportunity for healthier, resilient communities.

Tag: grow food not lawns