Farm Forward | Mason Lane Farm

Image credit: de Leon & Primer Architecture Workshop.
Our search for modern farm houses, barns, and other structures continues. The LEED Silver, award-winning Mason Lane Farm in Goshan, KY by de Leon & Primer Architecture Workshop is one of our newest favorites. Completed in 2009, the farm is a 2,000 acre property with a mix of functions including conservation, recreation, and a variety of agricultural operations and storage activities. All done with sustainability in mind and an eye for great, functional design.

Climate Adaptation Conference for Farmers

A sign of the times...3rd Annual Climate Adaptation Conference for Farmers hosted by Abundance North Carolina. Feb 6th, 2014 in Pittsboro.

SeanChron | Travel Review | Manawai Estate Chocolate

Being Sustainable Sean as well as Next Century Sean, I often try to connect into the new and noteworthy sustainability efforts whenever I travel. Each trip I take to Maui I do my best to add explore and share a new find. This trip I was lucky enough to get a heads up from Nicolette Van Der Lee at UH Maui College's Sustainable Living Institute of Maui (SLIM) about Manawai Estate Chocolate, a new seven-acre sustainable cacao farm near Haiku on Maui. I signed up for the tour straight away and am so happy that I did. My tour and time at Manawai Estate Chocolate will remain one of my favorite Maui experiences for a long time.

The tour was led by owner and Chef Melanie Boudar, a Master Chocolatier and Master Gardner, along with business partner Mark Meador and staff cacao guru Sinead Byrne. The farm is still in the startup phase so the tour itself lasted about 45 minutes but was packed full of history and information about the journey Melanie and the team had faced in getting the farm established.

Following the tour was an opportunity to taste the cacao bean as Melanie and the team led us through the process of making chocolate from roasted bean to a tasty beverage that we enjoyed on the spot, approximately another 45 minutes.

Next up and certainly the icing on the cake, was an opportunity to taste test chocolates (in bar form) from around the world and from Hawaii. Run much like a wine tasting, it was fantastic to have cacao aficionados leading us through the the intricate history and differences of cacao around the world and then honing in on the product options from Hawaii. All of them were ono (delicious) by the way but when tasted together, the subtle differences to become more prevalent.

All in all, a wonderful afternoon on a beautiful sustainable farm with great people learning and tasting great cacao and chocolate. I will certainly do it again and I highly recommend it if you are visiting Maui in the future. And make sure to support Chef Melanie's other chocolate venture online or in Wailea, Sweet Paradise Chocolate.

Cracking the cocoa beans for winnowing

Time for hand grinding the cocoa beans

The outcome of our labor and fantastic education sling the way...handmade-on-the-spot cocoa SO ono!

The tools of processing cocoa beans and making chocolate

Now time for chocolate tasting

Pictured above: Mark, Sinead, Melanie, and Nicolette. A Huge MAHALO NUI LOA to Manawai Estate Chocolate for the fantastic tour and tasting and to Nicolette from UH Maui for making the connection!

SeanChron | Modern Farmer Magazine

My new favorite magazine, Modern Farmer. Handsome fellow on the cover too.

Chipotle's "Back to the Start"

A recent TV ad by everyone's favorite sustainable fast food burrito chain, Chipotle, has created quite a stir. Some say it upstaged the Grammy Awards during which it aired and it has now won several awards. The ad/short film, produced by Creative Artists Agency and Nexus Productions and directed by filmmaker Johnny Kelly, Back to the Start, supports Chipotle's long running position on developing a sustainable food system. As an animated farmer learns about the gritty details of industrial farming, Willie Nelson covers Coldplay's tune The Scientist, the perfect soundtrack to make the spot hit home all the more.

In a June 2012 interview with Matt Lauer on TODAY, Matt Miller, President and CEO of the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), commented on the ad, winner of AICP's best commercial for 2011,

"it says that you can sell and have a social message, that's kind of what advertising is going towards right now".

We agree on all fronts, sometimes shaping the future does require going back to the start...to do things right from the beginning.

Book Club | The Earth Knows My Name

Future-ish is very excited to announce the first book in our Future-ish Book Club, The Earth Knows my Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans by Patricia Klindienst, Winner of an American Book Award for 2007.

Purchase the book from: Beacon Press | Amazon | Powells | Your Indie Book Store

From the book:

"Inspired by her own family's immigrant history, master gardener Patrica Klindienst traveled the country, gathering stories of urban, suburban, and rural gardens created by people rarely presented in American gardening books: Native Americans, immigrants from across Asia and Europe, and ethnic peoples whose ancestors were here long before oru national boundaries were drawn. In The Earth knows my Name, Klindienst writes about the beautiful yards and fields she discovered, each one an island of hope, offering us a model - on a sustainable scale- of a truly resotrative ecology."

Patricia Klindienst is a master gardener and an award-winning writing teacher. She lives and gardens in Guilford, Connecticut. This is her first book.

Year-round Wheat

Image Credit: Dehaan via Wikimedia Commons

If Wes Jackson succeeds in his life dream, the annual autumn wheat harvest may come to an end...and that's a good thing. In 1976, Jackson founded the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas to revolutionize modern agriculture by researching and demonstrating the concept of perennial polyculture. Conventional agriculture uses large amounts of water, chemicals, and fossil fuels and only produces crops once a year. By domesticating perennial crops like wheatgrass and hybridizing them with annual crops like wheat, the resulting crops are more productive, much less resource-intensive to maintain, and more in tune with the prairie ecosystem within which they grow. Best of all, as a strong proponent of sustainable agriculture, Jackson accomplishes all this without the use of genetic engineering. We've also heard that the Land Institute's annual Prairie Festival, full of lectures, storytelling, and music, is not to be missed.