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Organic Marin
∞ Recipes from Land to Table ∞
A Future of Promise and Hope
The public's appetite for healthy—and tasty—naturally produced food is growing. Larger environmental concerns, some on a planetary level, are causing individuals and families to ask: What can we do? One answer is buy organic, locally grown food from farmers who believe their responsibility is to enhance the soil, not deplete it; to work in partnership with nature, not overcome it; and to make use of all elements in the farming process, not discard them as waste.
∞ Marin Organic ∞
An organization of more than forty farmers and ranchers, Marin Organic is the most visible voice of the Marin organic food community. Formed in 1999 as an advocacy group for organic farming, Marin Organic now offers tours of farms and ranches and consumer education programs, sponsors an organic school lunch initiative that feeds over 12,000 children a week in local schools, and runs a weekly summer farmers' market in Point Reyes Station in which all the vendors come from within twenty miles of the market. (More information at www.marinorganic.org.)
Cow manure can power a farm (as it does at Straus Family Creamery). A solar array can cut dependency on the utility grid (as it does at Star Route Farm). A horse ranch can provide fertilizer for a tomato farm (as it does for Allstar Organics). And blemished produce, good enough to eat but difficult to sell, can provide healthy lunches for twelve thousand schoolchildren a week (as it does in Marin County, under a program started by Marin Organic in partnership with local public schools and farmers).
"Let us come to work with a sense of amazing abundance," says Helge Hellberg of Marin Organic. "If there's anything you have, we'll make use of it. Nature has provided more than we can ever use or ever need. The solutions to most, if not all, of our challenges are already out there if we can get away from consumption and waste and change our mindset."
One of Marin Organic's goals is to make Marin an organic county. That day may be a long way off, if indeed it ever comes. In the meantime, though, says Warren Weber of Star Route, "We're trying to produce as sustainable a county as possible.
"Through this networking of public and private organizations, of producers and consumers, we have created a model for other areas. We have been able, all of us together, to create a system and environment for sustainable agriculture to have a successful role in the community."
Contact: Tammie Barker, (800) 851-8923, ext. 7499, tbarker@amuniversal.com
Organic Marin: Recipes from Land to Table
Authors: Tim Porter & Farina Wong Kingsley, Produced By Marin Magazinek
ISBN-13: 978-0-7407-7314-3
ISBN-10: 0-7407-7314-3
Format: 10 x 9, 192 pp, Jacketed Hardcover, Color photography
Price: $29.99 ($32.99 Canada)
