Whole Green Love

We are excited to share with you our first guest post! Woot Woot! Chris Michael from Bright Agrotech discusses his company’s sweet produce growing systems. It’s so cool to hear about new and innovative ways people are accessing fresh and healthy produce. We want to thank Chris for sharing this with us! We hope you learn something new!

“Towards a Brighter Future of Food”

Chris Michael

It’s hard to be optimistic about the future of food in this country… But we are!

We’re growing food that feeds our local community and we’re doing it vertically, sustainably, and profitably!

The Bad News:

Let’s face it. When we look at the state of our agriculture system today, it can be very disheartening. Each day we’re bombarded by headlines about E-Coli, Listeria, and other food-borne illness outbreaks from tainted irrigation water or poor quality processing facilities.

We have no idea what’s really sprayed on the fields and how these pesticides and herbicides affect the health of our families and our environment.

It’s said the average American dinner travels an average of 1,500 miles from farm to plate. Studies are also showing that our food loses nutrients as soon as they’re picked, plucked, or harvested from the fields.

With that in mind, how on earth are we supposed to get the vital nutrients, vitamins, and nutrients that we’re trying to glean from eating “healthy foods?”

And, when we add in increasing urban sprawl, loss of precious topsoil, and a rapidly aging farmer population, things look pretty bleak, right?

But, in spite of all this gloom and doom…  

We’re hopeful and excited.

The Good News:

At Bright Agrotech, we’ve seen firsthand the challenges of being in agriculture today. We’ve seen the farms of our family and friends suffer from drought and crippling debt. Doing research at the University of Wyoming, our Co-Founder and CEO Nate Storey, Ph.D wanted to invent a more efficient method of growing healthier, more nutritious food that also helps farmers live better.

Before you write us off as deviant pot-peddlers, hear us out!

While it has an unfortunate stigma, hydroponics merely substitutes soil nutrients for a more potent, concentrated nutrient solution mixed with water. It’s WAY more efficient at giving your plants what they need to grow up big and strong, which increases the productivity of your farm or garden.

The type of hydroponics we use is called aquaponics.

This method of growing food is a more organic type that simply replaces a cleverly concocted nutrient fertilizer solution with fish!

That’s right, we use fish to grow [lots] of food!

Aquaponics is by no means a new concept. In fact. it’s been around for a long time. As cool as it is though, it’s having a difficult time transitioning from a backyard hobby to an economically sustainable commercial venture. Until now.

Practical Vertical Farming

You read that right. We’ve developed some kick ass vertical farming technology that provides some serious value across all three levels of food production and distribution (i.e. farmer, grocer, customer)!

The ZipGrow^TM Tower, our patented vertical farming tower that’s enabling a fresher food future, is the product of seven years of rigorous academic research.

Not only does it allow us to see some serious yields in our aquaponic greenhouse (Catch a video tour here!), we’ve designed it to transport live to market!

In the not too distant future you could be going to the store to cut the freshest produce from living walls.

Live Sales Model

About 60% of a farmer’s costs come from harvest, post-harvest labor, and packaging. Nate’s research confronted this massive cost head on and sought to eliminate it. Here in Laramie, we grow our towers and drive them a mile to the local grocer in which we have a specially designed and patented living green wall. The customer simply clips exactly what they need (helping to drastically reduce post-consumer waste), bag it themselves and take it to the checkout counter to be weighed and purchased. That means fresher food, more taste and better nutrients for the customer and the customer’s family!

Healthier food grown in YOUR KITCHEN

As you can see, we’ve been realizing the benefits of vertical farming for a few years now and we’re going even one step past the living green wall. We believe that growing and harvesting is so innately human that we want everyone to have the opportunity to grow healthier, more nutrient-dense food in their homes.

The Spring is our home version of our innovative vertical farming system that consists of everything you need to plant and grow delicious food in your home without taking up much space. You may have seen our Kickstarter project that we launched a few months back and we’re now in the final steps of bringing it to life.

But there’s more…

The coolest part about The Spring is that not only does it allow anyone to simply grow food in their kitchens and patios, it also enables an even fresher farming distribution model. Instead of your farmer taking their towers of living produce to the local grocer, they now take it directly to your home (like a milkman used to do!). To learn more about that, see our “Bright Future of Food” here!

The Future of Food

Relax! Do yourself a favor and turn off the evening news declaring another food-borne illness contamination. Put down the newspaper and the headlines about the skyrocketing price of corn.

The future of food isn’t all doom and gloom.

That said, it is a future waiting to be enacted and adopted by those who see the bigger picture. The fresh food revolution isn’t going to magically appear, sadly. We need advocates and early adopters with that innovative eye constantly looking out for the health of their families and their natural world.

We hope you’ll help us spread this message of hope to your friends, family, local Co-Op, or grocery store and demand healthier, locally-grown, nutritious food!

- Chris Michael

If you want to learn more about Bright Agrotech feel free to click on the links below! We hope you find yourself in your garden this upcoming growing season, whether it’s horizontal or vertical!

Find more from Bright Agrotech:

Website: www.brightagrotech.com

Blog: www.verticalfoodblog.com

YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/user/BrightAgrotechLLC

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrightAgrotech

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrightAgrotech

We are super excited to be a part of promoting the Healthy Life Summit, which is streaming for FREE from March 24^th – 30^th! This summit was organized by the blog network we are a part of, Village Green Network.

The Healthy Life Summit is a FREE 7-day, online virtual conference that features speakers like Sally Fallon Morell, Joel Salatin, Donna Gates, Daniel Vitalis, Matt Stone, Julia Ross, and Chris Kresser (and 28 more). You can see the full list of speakers here.

I jump up and down and shout “woohoo!” in my mind every time I look at the line-up of this awesome event! There are 5 tracks of topics: Healthy Eating, Healthy Body, Healthy Babies & Kids, Healthy Living, and Healthy World.

Some of the topics that will be covered include:

• Traditional food diets
• How to transition your family to real food
• Techniques for making real food easy and affordable
• Why preconception and pregnancy diets matter
• The dangers of GMO foods
• How to make homemade beauty products that are safe enough to eat
• Sustainable, grass-fed agriculture and why it’s important to your health

I just did a little SQUEEEEE inside because I’m so excited about this conference. I literally cannot contain myself!

This is sweet because nowhere else could you listen to this incredible lineup of speakers and topics for FREE. If you have a life anything like mine though, you won’t be available to hang out and listen to this streaming for the full week of March 24^th.

For that reason, consider preordering the download to the entire Healthy Life Summit for only $49 until March 23, 2013. By preordering, you will be able to listen to this whenever and wherever you want.

If you wait to order the Healthy Life Summit download until the conference is over, it will cost $199. Boo.

Preorder today at 75% off that price – just $49!

How does this work?

1. Click here to register today! You will get email updates to let you know more information about when you can listen to your favorite speakers and catch all of the topics you don’t want to miss!
2. Preorder the download package today so that you get the super reduced price of $49 (that is 75% off the actual price!) In all, the download includes 35 audio recordings and 35 video slideshows.
3. Download the full conference package on March 24^th! You can certainly listen to the conference via live stream, or just listen at your leisure!

This guy, Joel Salatin, is seriously my favorite. Has anyone else read any of his books? “Folks, This Ain’t Normal!” is so great!

The Healthy Life Summit is all of our favorite topics wrapped into one amazing event! We hope you’ll join us!

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s) have been all the talk in recent news, especially with Proposition 37 that was battled for in California. If you are unfamiliar with GMO’s I can give you a little background on this man-made creation. GMO’s are generally plants or crops that have been specifically created for human and or animal consumption that have had their molecular structure/make-up biologically altered. These laboratory plants were developed to enhance desirable traits in a crop such as resistance to herbicides and increased nutritional content of something that naturally may not carry certain micro or macronutrients. Sounds like a good idea, right? Not so fast.

Traditionally, plant enhancement takes place with conventional plant breeding, which is a slower process and results can be less discernable when compared with genetically engineered plants that can be quickly and accurately replicated with a desired trait. Surprisingly, genes can be transferred from plant to plant and with genes from non-plant organisms. Bacillus thuringiensis (B.t.) is a bacterium that creates crystal proteins that attack and damage/break down the cells of the gut in insects and larvae.  B.t. genes have been added to corn crops as a “natural” pesticide. It sounds like a freak science experiment. If this bacterium is harmful to insects, you have to question what it does to humans in any amount, right?!

Reasons why companies are in support of GMO’s and the biotechnology industry:

-Pest resistance

-Herbicide tolerance

-Disease resistance

-Cold tolerance

-Drought tolerance/salinity tolerance

-Nutrition

-Pharmaceuticals

-Phytormediation (An example is a poplar tree that has been genetically modified to clean up heavy metals from contaminated soil.)

Reasons for criticism:

-Potential harm to other organisms

-Reduced effectiveness of pesticides

-Gene transfer to non-target species (i.e. superweeds…yikes!)

-Allergenicity (i.e. gene from peanut into a soybean could create new allergens in peanut allergic people.)

-Growing concern of effects on human health

-Economic concern for small farms and/or third world countries if seeds become “patented” or if they create “suicide gene technology” and seeds will be sterile after only one growing season.

I start to sweat just talking about the potential problems. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion…but GMO’s scare me. Who are we to think we can play with mother nature? When you consider the reasons companies are in support of GMO’s it all leads back to less work, more product, more MONEY. Irreversible damage to our food supply, environment, and even health could result from the continued use of these man-made “foods”.  Many products, especially processed products, contain some form of a GMO. The FDA considers GMO foods to be Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS). The FDA views GMO foods to be substantially equivalent to the real whole food, so at this time they do not require companies to identify on a label when a GMO is used in a product.

There is SO MUCH to talk about when it comes to GMO’s, but I just wanted to do a brief introduction…I could go on and on all day. I’m sure you will be hearing us talk about this again soon, but in the meantime further educate yourself on what you are putting in your body. I don’t know about you, but I want to know EXACTLY what I am eating.  You’d be surprised at what companies (even “natural food companies”) use some form of GMO’s in their products.

The Non GMO Project has verified non-GMO companies and products you can support…along with LOTS of great information. The Cornucopia Institute also has a wealth of information to sift through. The movie Genetic Roulette is a great movie to watch about GMO’s… be sure to check it out. If you were unaware of GMO’s before this I hope you have a chance to read more about their use. It’s so important that we make informed decisions about the food we are putting in our body and are aware of the companies we are supporting when purchasing products.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and concerns regarding GMO’s.

This post and recipe was shared on Whole Foods Wednesdays, and Real Food Wednesday.

This past weekend was a weekend with no plans. Never happens. I love those kinds of weekends more than anything in the world. I even had a little time to do some canning.

Nic and I had been postponing lazy about preserving of our last batch of tomatoes from the garden. Sadly, our crop didn’t turn out that awesome this year. I thought it would be a good year because our plants had a lot of flowers that sprouted into tomatoes, but it seems like the summer went from scorching hot to chilly. My little tomato babies weren’t able to ripen.

From the tomatoes that our garden did produce, we turned into spaghetti sauce. Lovely, delicious sauce. I use a recipe that I got from Nic’s Aunt Tracy (thanks Tracy!). In all honesty, I’m not sure if this is a family recipe or if it comes from a cookbook, so I apologize for not citing it any further. In my searches, I have not found a recipe just like this. It is amazing, flavorful, and easy to make (the chopping just takes some time). Nic and I tried canning this year for a couple of reasons. It won’t overrun our chest freezer since we do buy many things in bulk and freeze other items from our garden. And also, I’d like to get away from storing as many things in plastic as possible. That said, we have made this recipe for 4 years now and this is the first year that we are canning it. The sauce freezes great! If you can find glass containers to freeze your sauce in, awesome. Otherwise, look for BPA free plastic containers.

Canned Spaghetti Sauce

24 cups quartered tomatoes, washed with no stems*

6 cups diced onions (1/2 red, 1/2 white)

5 1/2 tsp diced garlic

1 cup & 2 Tbsp olive oil

3 – 12 oz cans of tomato paste

3/4 cup chopped red peppers*

3/4 cup chopped green peppers*

6 Tbsp dried oregano

6 Tbsp dried basil

6 Tbsp salt

2 Tbsp black pepper

3/4 cup sugar

6 big bay leaves

Blend or food process (the immersion blender works great for this!) tomatoes into small chunks. Mix all ingredients and tomatoes into a large soup kettle. Bring to a boil. Then reduce heat to low and simmer for 1 hour, stirring frequently. Do not let the sauce burn on the bottom of the pot. Remove the bay leaves and pour into sterilized jars. Proceed to can using the water bath or pressure canner method and let cool.

All of the ingredients have been mixed together and the sauce isn’t quite to boiling yet!

Cooked for 1 hour and ready to be canned!

I have not used a pressure canner before, nor am I familiar with that process. The notes on this recipe that has been passed on to me say you would process pints for 20 minutes at 11-12 pounds and quarts for 25 minutes at 11-12 pounds. Please use your discretion. Since we have a glass top stove, we processed ours using the water bath method for 45 minutes on the grill.

This recipe makes 20 pints or 10 quarts of sauce.

*We don’t even mess around with peeling or deseeding our tomatoes. There are a lot of nutrients in the tomato skins that I don’t want to miss out on and I don’t mind the seeds. If you are using an immersion blender to puree your tomatoes, you won’t even notice that the tomato skin is in the sauce. We grow San Marzano’s in our garden which are meatier than other tomatoes and totally perfect for sauces. If you can, find a meatier tomato for this recipe. Also, this recipe calls for green and red peppers, which are great, but I have also used banana peppers. They work just fine too. Essentially, I use whatever is available from our garden at the time I’m making the sauce.

If you try your hand at making this recipe, I hope you love it as much as I do. Not only is it the perfect way to use up tomatoes in the garden, but once you have the sauce made I love being 10 minutes away from a homemade meal. We always keep spaghetti noodles on hand and whether we have some ground beef in the freezer or not, it’s the perfect meal. We have also used the sauce in a pinch when we don’t have pizza sauce on hand. Just run a small amount of it through a fine strainer so that it is a little bit thicker than spaghetti sauce to smear on a crust.

This spaghetti sauce can also be used for a gift for the coming holiday season. Wedge a beautiful jar of your homemade sauce in a gift basket with some lovely whole wheat spaghetti noodles, a wedge of Parmesan cheese, and a gift card to your local bakery. Your gift recipient can pick up a fresh loaf of bread to round out the meal.

What goodies did you can this year?

This recipe was shared on Fat Tuesday.

As our garden winds down this season, we are meticulously preserving anything that we can before we shut her down for good. It’s kind of like a full time job. The veggies dictate our schedule these days and when things become ripe, we hop in the kitchen. Today’s food preservation task was an easy one. Love that.

One of my biggest pet peeves is having to buy a full container of fresh herbs and only needing just a pinch for a recipe. What a waste. I’m pretty good at meal planning around what we have in our pantry and fridge, but I’m not that good. I had to figure out a way to not let those delicate little flavors go to waste.

We have a couple of ice cube trays that are never used because we have an ice maker in our freezer. (Click here to find BPA free ice cube trays!) Preserving small amounts of food in ice cube trays is super easy and those little cube cups are the perfect size for things like baby food, small amounts of juice, coffee cubes for iced coffee (watered down coffee is not okay), and fresh herbs.

Tonight, I plucked a few handfuls of parsley and thyme off of the big bushes that we have out on our patio. I chopped them up and filled the ice cube holes half way and then then filled them with water. Pop them in the freezer and you are on your way to preserving those fresh flavors and not letting any extras go to waste. If you don’t mind having your ice cube trays tied up, you can keep your herbs frozen right in the trays. If you want to free them up for other freezing opportunities, pop the cubes out once they are frozen solid and throw them in freezer bag and back into the freezer. Make sure you label the bags so you know the date of freeze and the contents. Little green ice cubes will likely all look alike in the freezer. Then, when a recipe you are making calls for just a tablespoon of this or that, pop the herb ice cube right into the dish your cooking. No need to defrost ahead of time.

I used ice cube trays to freeze portions of the pesto I made with our fresh basil. I also purchased a bottle of beautiful, organic prune juice to give to Lyla. We might have fed her a little too much banana a few weeks back and she got a bit backed up… I only wanted to give Lyla a tiny bit of juice to get things going but I didn’t want the rest of the juice to go to waste. I pulled out the ice cube trays to freeze small amounts of the juice to pull out a cube at a time, if needed.

Anything besides water that you freeze in your ice cube trays?