Happy new year! The beginning of the year is always a good time to take stock, so we thought it might be appropriate to look back at what we accomplished—and, erm, failed to accomplish—during the last twelve months. Much remains to be done before our hopes for Madroño Ranch are completely realized, though we took what felt like some significant strides in 2010. With apologies for any perceived self-indulgence, here are some of them.

First, thanks to the wonderful and talented Shawn and Susanne Harrington of Austin’s Asterisk Group, Madroño Ranch now has a vibrant, striking, beautiful visual identity—logo (above), wordmark, etc.—which we hope eventually to splash all over actual and virtual reality. (Madroño Ranch T-shirts! Madroño Ranch gimme caps! Madroño Ranch bumper stickers and koozies and belt buckles and….)

Second, we’ve begun to rethink our initial determination to offer residencies only for environmental writers, however broadly defined (poets, philosophers, essayists, whatever). We had initially thought we would restrict our offerings to writers because, well, as a couple of recovering English majors, we felt like we knew writing better than we knew art, and (perhaps more important) we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure (kilns, darkroom facilities, printing presses, whatever). Most writers, after all, are highly mobile these days, requiring little in the way of equipment beyond a laptop computer. But it has become increasingly obvious, even to us, that virtually the same is true of many visual artists as well—digital photographers and collagists, to name just a couple. Painters can travel with paints, portable easels, and suchlike. And then there are environmental artists, like Andy Goldsworthy, who use materials found on-site—rocks, leaves, branches, etc. Why should we exclude such creative thinkers from our pool of potential residents?

Third, while we are still a long way from officially opening our residential program for environmental writers (and artists)—we have yet to construct the small casitas we envision as individual workspaces, and we have yet to hire the necessary personnel to cook and care for our residents—we have managed to find a couple of brave souls willing to serve as “guinea pigs.” Melissa Gaskill and E. Dan Klepper will each spend several days at Madroño Ranch in the next couple of months, working, resting, and experiencing some if not all of what our actual residents will experience once we’re fully up and running. We look forward to hearing their feedback, suggestions, etc.

Fourth, our friend Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due came up with a new and exciting way to open the ranch to a wider public through a variety of sustainable hunting, fishing, and cooking “schools” throughout the year. The first, Deer School, brought six guests to the ranch in November, and was a thoroughgoing success; now we’re looking forward to Hog School in early March and Freshwater Flyfishing School in mid-May, both of which have already sold out. If they go well, we’re hoping to make these (and perhaps other such schools) an annual tradition at Madroño Ranch.

Fifth, we finally gained state approval of the label that will appear on the packages of bison meat we sell, which means we can finally go ahead with our first “harvest” (as it’s euphemistically called) this month. (We had hoped, naively, to harvest our first bison in October, but the approval process turned out to be considerably longer and more complicated than we had imagined.)

Sixth, Heather made significant progress in her quest to become a true chickenista, following the example of local legend Carol Ann Sayle of Austin’s Boggy Creek Farm. Our original flock of fifty or so laying hens took up residence in their bombproof (and, we trust, owl- and hawkproof) new coop, which we call the Chicken Palace (pictured below). A few months later Robert’s brilliant creation the Chicken Tractor (actually a mobile coop on wheels) became the home of a new flock of about twenty younger hens. (As of last week, the two groups were just beginning to commingle.)

Seventh, while we still don’t have an actual Madroño Ranch website (though we’re working on it!), we do have an official Madroño Ranch Facebook page. We invite those of you on that ubiquitous social network to check it out, and click the “Like” button if you’re so inclined; until our website is up and running, that will be the easiest way to keep track of what’s happening at the ranch in what we hope will be an exciting twelve months to come.

Perhaps none of these accomplishments sounds terribly important in and of itself, but each brought us just a little closer to our goal. Our hope for 2011 is that we—and you too, Gentle Reader—keep striding throughout the new year, whether the steps be large ones or small.

What we’re reading
Heather: Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (still—it’s hard!)
Martin: Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans.

And did I mention corn?

We drove last week from Austin to Gambier, Ohio, to deliver our youngest to college, and then back to Austin. (Empty nest. Delight. Depression.) That this trip was my maiden voyage into the American Midwest was just one of many notable firsts. At about the time we crossed the line from Kentucky to Ohio, it began: fields of corn and soybeans on either side of the road stretching to the horizon, interrupted only occasionally by copses of oaks or by farm houses and barns or by grain storage units. We started to joke about it by the time we got to Gambier, smack in the middle of Ohio. After installing our daughter in her new dorm room, we turned our noses west and drove from Gambier to Clarksville, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, in one endless, relentless, repetitive, mind- and butt-numbing 600-mile day. The joking stopped at about mile 100.

The landscape wasn’t unpleasant by any means: the apparently unlimited fecundity of the earth was impressive, as was the system that ordered such abundance. The scope of it! And we didn’t even make it into Iowa or Nebraska! No wonder the people behind this astonishing productivity are proud of it.

But there’s another way to see that landscape, and those afflicted with the double vision I wrote about in an earlier post might see the abundance as a tumor, or at least a spreading rash. The economic, cultural, and environmental damage imposed by the efficiencies of agribusiness have been well documented, most popularly by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, along with films like Food, Inc. and Fresh. The idea that inexpensive food can be grown only through the use of annuals and monocultures, efficiencies of scale, and heavy pesticide use has been seriously challenged by farmers like Joel Salatin and Will Allen. Along with the steady depletion of topsoil, the off-farm effects of conventional agriculture are also well documented, from depletion of local biodiversity to the rapidly growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.

After spending the night in Clarksville, we drove through another scene of apparent abundance en route to Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Arkansas, of course, is the home of Tyson Foods, which began as a chicken wholesaler in 1935. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that I love chickens for reasons that aren’t entirely rational. Last year, we moved our chickens at Madroño from the nasty old chicken coop to the Chicken Palace and added substantially to their numbers. The Chicken Palace, built by Robert Selement, the ranch’s redoubtable manager, could probably withstand a nuclear attack and has already foiled a whole lot of skunks, raccoons, coyotes, bobcats, hawks, and owls.

One of the great pleasures of a Madroño morning is to let the ladies (one of whom is named Fred, for reasons not entirely clear to us) out of the Palace and into the adjoining pasture and then to throw them the previous night’s vegetable scraps. From the moment they see me coming down the hill, they begin an almost-intelligible running commentary that steadily increases in volume and intensity. (“Can you believe she wears boots with her nightgown?” “God, I hope there’s no fennel in that scrap bowl.” “Hasn’t she ever opened a gate before? What’s taking her so long?”) Anticipation is so focused that by the time I open the door to the yard, and then the gate from the yard to the pasture, there’s a charge in the air that surely rivals the first seconds of the running of the bulls in Pamplona. No, really. Those chickens are moving. And I’m laughing. And very happy to gather (and sell) their marigold-yolked eggs. (For the reflections of a true chickenista, be sure to check out the highly readable blog posts of Carol Ann Sayle, who owns and operates Austin’s wonderful Boggy Creek Farm along with her husband Larry Butler. Carol Ann’s chicken blogs are worthy of a BBC comedy of manners with period costumes.)

Given my tender feelings toward our chickens, seeing a Tyson truck rolling down an Arkansas highway carrying its cargo of tightly packed chicken cages made me tense. When we got to Eureka Springs, with its funky old boutiques and gingerbread houses, we found a restaurant that served local produce and whose waitress told us that she was a “universal soul.” I relaxed a little, enough to start chatting with the friendly couple sitting next to us. As it turned out, the husband was a Tyson chicken farmer. The 16-year-old boy he had hired for the summer was worthless, he said, but the 14-year-old was great. He didn’t have an attitude yet, and never complained about the hours he had to spend each day picking up dead chickens.

I got tense again.

How can something that seems so clearly wrong to one person seem perfectly acceptable to another? How can I have arrived at my advanced age and still be surprised that this is so? Even though we all technically speak the same language—the Midwestern corn and soybean farmers, the Arkansas chicken farmer, and I—there seems to be an unbridgeable perceptual gulf between us.< When I’m feeling this kind of tension, I become almost ridiculously grateful for things like the National Geographic website, which describes the work of young scientists with big ideas that “show a potential for future breakthroughs.” Among the chosen for 2010—and they are a fascinating group—is an agroecologist named Jerry Glover who works for The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. His field of study, so to speak, is perennial grains, wheat in particular. Unlike annual crops, which need to be replanted every year, drain nutrients from the soil, and allow erosion when they die, perennial crops can be “harvested year after year and maintain excellent soil quality.” Glover doesn’t preach (at least not on the National Geographic website), and he doesn’t point fingers at conventional farmers and say: Bad, bad, bad. He points to the evidence in the soils he works with, which speaks for itself—and in the same dialect as the farmers whose practices I find so confounding.

Seeing the scope of those Midwestern cornfields is sobering. Thinking about the money, time, and corporate muscle they represent is daunting. Reading about the salmonella outbreak in factory farm-produced eggs is appalling. When you buy from your local farmers and humane producers, you’re allying yourself with an entity so tiny it barely stubs the giant’s toe when it gets kicked aside. But that tiny stumbling block gathers a little more heft with each kick. To mix my images, watching this process is like watching a big pot of water boil: just when you think your stove is busted or your water’s dead, you start seeing those tiny bubbles appear and get perceptibly more emphatic—especially when then are young scientists like Jerry Glover working next to the giant and turning up the heat. And if those of us who eat keep asking for it, the giant will eventually be able to put sweet organic (or at least less devastating) corn into the pot and feed the less-eroded world with it. Sounds like a fairy tale, I know, but maybe it’s more of a parable—a story with an unexpected and revelatory twist at the end. Whatever it is, just think of the possible chicken commentary on giants in the kitchen. I’ll bet their footwear choices are even more entertaining than mine.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Martin: Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation

Happy Thanksgiving! On any list of the things for which we give thanks, the Austin Farmers Market (downtown on Saturday mornings and at the Triangle on Wednesday afternoons), the Sunset Valley Farmers Market (on Saturday mornings), and Boggy Creek Farm (on Wednesday mornings) rank at or near the top. They’ve become a huge part of our lives, and our consumption of weird seasonal vegetables has skyrocketed, which I personally think is pretty cool, though our last remaining teenager might beg to differ.

Moreover, Heather says, with only mild exaggeration, that she’d have no social life at all if not for the farmers markets, and our Saturdays feel incomplete if we haven’t seen Sunny Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison, Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due (that’s him in the photo above), J. P. Hayes of Sgt. Pepper’s, Loncito Cartwright of Loncito’s Lamb, and the rest of the gang at their stalls. Heck, they’re nice to us even when we don’t buy anything from them!

All kidding aside, the social aspect of farmers markets is actually one of the most important things about them. But don’t take my word for it; listen to Richard McCarthy and Daphne Derven, the executive directors of two organizations that have played crucial roles in the (re)birth of farmers markets in New Orleans, thereby helping the Crescent City bounce back in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

According to McCarthy, executive director of MarketUmbrella.org, reinventing older traditions like the farmers market has helped New Orleans bridge long-standing divisions of race, class, and region as it seeks to recover in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The storm, as terrible as it was, has afforded the city a rare opportunity to rethink, not simply recreate, its civic and social institutions: “As we rebuild, all the old issues have been laid bare. Now we have the chance to address them.”

McCarthy said that many farmers and fishermen from outside New Orleans were initially terrified by the prospect of coming into the city to sell their crops and catch, but in the Big Easy, where cuisine is the nearest thing to a civic religion, talking about and looking at food brought people out of their homes and into previously scary public spaces. The city’s markets served a vital function for people who were grieving the devastating loss of family, friends, and property; as McCarthy put it, “They wanted the public place where they could hug each other, cry, see the citrus and the flowers.”

He noted that some have marginalized the local/sustainable food movement, in part because “we defined what we were against, rather than what we were for.” Instead, he advocates portraying markets as the legitimate community assets they are; as an example, he cited the Crescent City Farmers Market, which contributed $8.9 million to the local economy last year.

Despite such impressive numbers, access to food remains a major issue in the city, according to Derven, executive director of New Orleans Food and Farm Network. In New Orleans East, for example, there is only one supermarket for a population of 28,000 people (the national average is one supermarket for every 9,000 people). She added that there are around 60,000 empty properties in New Orleans, more than three times the pre-Katrina total. Her organization aims to educate and empower individuals, neighborhoods, and communities, “from the person growing herbs in a pot to urban farmers cultivating up to fifty acres,” to use the available land to grow food. She believes that “‘Farmer’ is the green job of the next decade.”

We heard McCarthy and Derven at the nineteenth annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities, held in New Orleans on November 11–14. They were panelists at a fascinating session convened by New Orleans columnist, filmmaker, and food maven Lolis Eric Elie, which also featured Donna Cavato, director of the wonderful Edible Schoolyard New Orleans program at the S. J. Green School, and Rashida Ferdinand, director of the Sankofa Marketplace in the Lower Ninth Ward. The theme of this year’s conference was “Sustaining Today’s Artists,” and what better place to think about how to support the creative imagination than the Crescent City, which is once again a vibrant cultural center despite the devastating (and ongoing) effects of Katrina?

The conference was an epic win. We learned a lot, we met many smart and fascinating people, and of course we ate like royalty (high points: the “best roast beef po’ boy on earth,” as proclaimed by Gourmet Magazine, at Parasol’s; the fried okra, crawfish etouffée, and bread pudding at The Praline Connection; and the Louisiana shrimp and grits at Herbsaint). But the best and most inspiring food of all was the food for thought prepared and served by McCarthy and Derven and their fellow panelists.

What we’re reading
Heather: Denise Levertov, Selected Poems
Martin: Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (still!)

This summer we attended a screening of Fresh, a documentary that highlights the efficiency and productivity of organic farming and the casual cruelty and hidden costs of industrial agriculture. Along with about a hundred others, we watched the film under the pecan trees at Boggy Creek Farm while eating locally sourced vegetarian picnic dinners provided by the Alamo Drafthouse, one of the screening’s cosponsors. (The others were Edible Austin and our friend Steve Kinney’s Front Porch Project.)

This kind of setting induces feelings of satisfaction that can all too easily morph into self-righteousness, and there’s no question that this event was a classic case of preaching to the choir. One of Boggy Creek’s neighbors’ front yards frequently sports a sign demanding housing for the homeless, not food for the rich. There’s no question that the momentum behind the local/sustainable food movement has been slowed by the argument that it’s a movement for the dainty tastes of the economic elite.

Fresh delivers a powerful counterpunch—maybe even a KO—in the person and work of Will Allen, whose nonprofit Growing Power Inc. operates two acres of greenhouses in working-class Milwaukee, producing mountains of affordable, healthy food, and trains countless inner-city residents to convert empty lots into thriving organic food centers.

The son of a sharecropper, Allen believes with every fiber of his 6’7″ body that healthy food is primarily a social justice issue: income should have no bearing on access to quality food. He himself is a happy consumer of doughnuts and doesn’t condemn those who have no alternative to KFC, but his passion for fresh food is altering the urban landscape and the food choices of thousands of people who might otherwise face a future of obesity and diabetes.

We’re no experts on food pricing, but we would guess that Growing Power enjoys a pricing “advantage” over other organic farmers because of grant money and a sizable volunteer labor pool. Agribusiness is able to control costs through government subsidies. What if the playing field on which organic and industrial agriculture compete were level? If organics were subsidized? If the costs of the ecological devastation caused by agribusiness monocultures, manure cesspools, and the health issues resulting from fast foods were factored into the cost of “cheap” food?

Before the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, many considered conservation a hobby for the wealthy. Carson made clear the connection between environmental issues and civil rights. We hope that people like Will Allen and movies like Fresh will do the same for the local/sustainable food movement.

After the screening at Boggy Creek, Edible Austin sold copies of the movie on DVD, along with licensing agreements allowing purchasers to show it to groups of up to twenty people—neighborhood gatherings, church groups, book clubs, etc. Through this bottom-up, grass-roots, guerilla marketing campaign, the producers hope to spread the word far beyond those hundred or so predominantly white, relatively wealthy faces under the trees. We bought two copies, one for Robert and one for us.

What we’re reading
Heather: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The River Cottage Meat Book
Martin: Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

But, like magic, remarkable people have appeared and pulled ideas and answers out of what looks to us like empty space. Some of them we’ve known for years; some we’ve met recently. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most magical of them:

There’s no way we could even contemplate this project without the enthusiasm, hard work, raucous good humor, and skills of Robert Selement, the manager of Madroño Ranch; his wife Sherry; and their children Ashlie, Brittany, and Greg. Robert can fix or build anything. Sherry can grow, cook, and take care of anything—witness their yard full of orphaned fawns, abandoned ducks, stray geese, random peafowl, countless dogs and cats, and other vagrant species too numerous to mention. Not only do Ashlie and Brittany do the heavy labor, they do it fashionably, and nobody knows the ranch better than Greg—just ask him!

Hugh Fitzsimons is the dueño of Thunder Heart Bison and a childhood acquaintance of mine whom I reencountered four years ago at the Sunset Valley Farmers Market. Hugh supplied us with our initial herd and has patiently schooled us in the ornery ways of bison, graciously fielded numerous panicked phone calls, and hospitably allowed us to invite ourselves to his South Texas ranch to see his fascinating and humane operation in action. Larry Butler and Carol Ann Sayle of Austin’s amazing Boggy Creek Farm have also been inspirational figures, as well as providers of wonderful produce and models for our own chicken-wrangling efforts.

Glee Ingram and Anne Province spent a weekend at the ranch with me hashing out the mission statement. Glee runs Growing Designs Inc., a landscaping firm in Austin, and is also the founder of Greenbelt Guardians, who lovingly care for Austin’s Barton Creek Greenbelt; her experience with the complex interactions of Hill Country landscapes and the built environment has been hugely influential. Annie is the vice president of the Academy of Oriental Medicine at Austin; she has an M.B.A. from Texas A&M and a master’s in religion from the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, and was for many years an administrator at St. Edward’s University, where she still teaches. Her business background has been invaluable to a couple of liberal-artsy flakes like us.

The inimitable Steven Tomlinson, professor at the Acton School of Business and award-winning playwright, graciously allowed us to pick his brain and ask all kinds of stupid questions over breakfast at the Kerbey Lane Café. Jim Magnuson, head of the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, was an early and unflaggingly enthusiastic fan of the idea. Divit Tripathi came out to the ranch and shared his expertise on site planning (and chickens). S. Kirk Walsh, the moving spirit behind the Austin Bat Cave, and her husband, filmmaker and writer Michael Dolan, also came out to the ranch and offered a writer’s perspective on what we were up to. Pliny Fisk, cofounder of Austin’s Center for Maximum Building Potential, and architect Logan Wagner offered inspiration in thinking of how the built environment at Madroño might mesh with the center’s mission and vision.

Caitlin Strokosch, Russ Smith, and the gang at the Alliance of Artists Communities continue to be an invaluable resource for us and many others hoping to turn similar dreams into reality. Peter Barnes of the Mesa Refuge in California and Jalene Case of the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon graciously gave us tours of their wonderful facilities and answered more of our seemingly endless supply of stupid questions.

All of these people have brought unexpected and wonderful things to our metaphorical table. It should go without saying that without their expertise, encouragement, and time, we wouldn’t have gotten even this far—but it’s worth saying anyway.

What we’re reading
Heather: Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science
Martin: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities