Tennessee Fainting Goats and Red Zinger Tea! There are many interesting things to be found on small farms. Watch as we visit Golden Acres Ranch in Monticello and Turkey Hill Farm in Tallassee’s Baum Community.
Rob Diaz de Villegas WFSU-TV
As I was starting preproduction for this piece, my wife Amy prepared a map of Red Hills Small Farm Alliance member farms. It’s interesting to see the proximity of these farms to water. Agriculture is of key importance to our water, from the withdrawals farms make from our aquifer to any runoff they might send back to waterways, into sinkholes, and back into the aquifer. Every farm interacts with its natural surroundings in different ways.
Louise Divine harvests Roselle at Turkey Hill Farm.
The Red Hills Small Farm Alliance is a collective of small farms located within 100 miles of Tallahassee, mostly within what is considered to be the Greater Red Hills Region. This range encompasses several watersheds, from the Wakulla Springshed to the Ochlockonee, St. Marks, and Aucilla rivers. Many of these waterways have been the setting for previous EcoAdventures, and so have the protected lands around them. In the video above, we explore a different kind of outdoor setting that has the potential to either protect or degrade our water.
These small farms make for an interesting alternative kind of outdoor activity. Many are open to the public to varying degrees (please do call first), and especially so during New Leaf Market’s Farm Tour. On October 25 and 26, Red Hills farms and other local food producers will open the doors for the public to see. Many will have rides, treats, and activities for kids. As I mentioned in my previous post, kids are becoming increasingly out of touch with nature. The same thing is happening with people and their understanding of where food comes from. This is part of why these farms are welcoming visitors. They care about how food is grown, and they often love to share it with you.
The Red Hills Small Farm Alliance has created an event that dovetails with Farm Tour, Seven Days of Local Delights. Seven Days is a series of workshops, cooking classes, and film screenings like- shameless plug- WFSU’s Oyster Doctors playing at Tall Timbers.
Many of these farms are organic, or at the very least are dedicated to a sustainable way of growing food. This isn’t a requirement for joining, but RHSFA CO-Executive Directors Louise Divine (Turkey Hill Farm, Tallahassee) and Katie Harris (Full Earth Farm, Quincy) make sure to offer opportunities to learn about sustainable practices through their Growers Circle workshops. In the video above, we see a little about how Turkey Hill and Golden Acres Ranch raise their products. Bobbie Golden decided that organic standards were a little too stringent for Golden Acres, but her animals are kept free from chemicals and hormones, and have space to roam. On the other hand, Louise and Herman Holley at Turkey Hill are fully dedicated to organic agriculture. And as we find in our next segment, set to air on October 29 (7:30 pm ET on WFSU-TV), Bobbie, Louise, and Herman take great care to see that their actions on the farm protect our water supply.
Bobbie Golden reflects by her sinkhole at Golden Acres ranch.
In this next segment, we revisit the recent Sharing Water Conference win Monticello. We visit a Monticello water treatment plant that connects directly to Simpsons Nursery. They have a novel system for reclaiming and reusing water that intends to both conserve water usage and keep wastewater out of the aquifer. We also revisit the farms featured in the video above. Golden Acres has some sensitive wetlands on their property, which has Bobbie Golden thinking about water issues. And Herman shows us how he makes compost. His process uses materials that might otherwise sit in landfills and creates a means of fertilizing plants that minimizes the flow of nutrients into local waterways (for them, Black Creek, a tributary of the St. Marks River).
Also coming up, Shakespeare will take over the Ecology Blog for the month of January. Details will be released soon, but it’s a different kind of project for us, one that involves biologists and actors, breathtaking vistas and the words of a man who was surprisingly into nature. Also, I follow up on my previous post, where I took my three-year-old son kayaking on the Wakulla River. His real water obsession is the Apalachicola River. He and I joined RiverTrek 2014 for a couple of miles, camping and kayaking at Owl Creek.
