MCO Newsletter June 2009: Issue #2

Welcome to our June newsletter. Lots has been happening since our newsletter last month. Where to begin?

Well our Organic Home Delivery service is well and truly up and running now and so far so good. We've had lots of happy customers and have maintained a high quality of produce in all our boxes. It's been a dream of mine for over 10 years now to start a farm and work co-operatively with other organic farmers to deliver, fresh, local and certified organic food straight to people's doorsteps. I truly believe that this along with other concepts such as the Farmers Market is the future of food production.

"Why?", you might ask. Well you only have to look around at what is happening to the planet to see there are some problems. I believe these are largely linked to agriculture and the food distribution systems that are widely used across the globe. Food is often trucked from one end of the country to another and then back again, just so the supermarkets can save costs by centralising their packing operations. Conventional agriculture according to a recent UK Government survey is responsible for over 30% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions. The majority of this comes from it's over-reliance on chemical fertilisers and from transportation. Producing synthetic chemical fertilisers is extremely energy intensive and is a high user of petro-chemicals. Of course we then have to live with all the chemicals when they run off into our waterways. People also ingest them when they eat non-organic food.

As you should know, synthetic chemical inputs such as fertiliser are banned in organic farming and as a result a survey by the Department of Environment and Rural Affairs in the UK has found that Organic Farming methods are 40% more energy efficient than non-organic farming methods, which of course is far kinder to our planet. It has also been proven in over 400 scientific studies that you not only avoid ingesting nasty chemicals by eating organic food it is also higher in minerals, trace elements, antioxidants, flavanoids and vitamins than non-organic food.

I'll continue more along this theme in next month's newsletter, but hope that this gives you reason enough that if you don't already you really should be eating organic food.

Cheers,

Down on the Farm

The month of May saw a couple of weeks of sunshine and lulled us into a sense that the wet season had ended and the dry begun. That was of course until the storm rocked up and gave us all a battering! It caused a fair bit of damage on the farm and took the cover off our seedling nursery. Luckily most of the seedlings escaped without too much damage apart from a leaching of nutrients. The crops in the field however got a more severe pasting. It wiped out our zucchini crop and severely shortened the length of our cucumber crop. It also wiped out a few thousand lettuce seedlings.Other than that all of the other living things on the farm survived, including us, thankfully.

We're still battling with our ongoing duck problem. They keep coming and visiting the farm at night every full moon for around 3 or 4 nights and munching through our veges. This time around they completely demolished our crop of snow peas, which were near to harvest. Very frustrating to say the least but we're determined not to be outwitted by a bunch of ducks!

All in all though the farm is looking pretty spectacular at the moment, especially in the winter sunshine. It's a pretty special time of year when it's so cold in the mornings and you have to work hard to warm up, makes us appreciate nature. We're pretty fortunate to be located at ReGenesis Farm and although Munch Crunch Organics doesn't own the farm it certainly feels like home. We plan on having an open day next month, so watch this space or keep an eye on our website for further information.

For the rest of this month we'll continue planting leafy green crops such as Bok Choi and Lettuce, but we'll also be planting a lot more winter Brassicas, such as Broccoli, Kale, Cauliflower and Cabbage. It's too cold now to plant Sweetcorn and Basil, but we do have some in the ground that is near to harvest so hopefully it will remain warm enough during the daytime to make it through to harvest. You will of course be able to buy it and lots of other yummy food directly from us through our affordable online organic home delivery at munchcrunchorganics.com.au.

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