Farmers' Markets, Farm Stands & U-pick News

And you thought scare tactics were so last year. Turns out Dick Cheney isn't the only one who wanted to frighten people into panicky overreactions…now food officials are summoning the image of (ick!) bloody diarrhea to try to support increased restrictions on Oregon's burgeoning farmers' markets.Small farmers who sell direct to the public at farmers' markets are facing the prospect of punitive rules that may reduce consumer choices in the markets and cause further headaches and uncertainty....

And you thought scare tactics were so last year. Turns out Dick Cheney isn't the only one who wanted to frighten people into panicky overreactions…now food officials are summoning the image of (ick!) bloody diarrhea to try to support increased restrictions on Oregon's burgeoning farmers' markets.Small farmers who sell direct to the public at farmers' markets are facing the prospect of punitive rules that may reduce consumer choices in the markets and cause further headaches and uncertainty....

This is a moving melding of music and technological art, a project by John Boswell called The Symphony of Science. Using auto-tuning to stitch together videos of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye into a musical quilt, its stated purpose is "to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form."

The wheels of justice grind ever so slowly. Last spring the Oregon Dept. of Agriculture (ODA) started rumbling about the need to impose new rules regulating the vendors at farmers' markets. Their idea was to do a series of "surveillance exercises" to check compliance with exisiting regulations. Sounds fine, right?The answer is, not so much. The problem is that current ODA regulations see small farmers who sell directly to the public in the same way they view large industrial agricultural...

It seems that every time I go to the farmers' market, I witness someone looking quizzically at a fruit or vegetable as if for the first time. I can almost hear them thinking, 'This is crazy-looking... How am I supposed to eat this!?' While some brave souls toss the sunchokes, quince, parsnips, giant cauliflower mushrooms, burdock, kohlrabi, and celeriac into their market bags, far too many place it back into the pile and run back to their spinach and potatoes. This, my friends, is a shame. Sure...