This Week in Jewish Farming: Season of abundance

By Ben Harris for Telegraph

Apparently, I jumped the gun.

Last week, I was waxing poetic about how safe and sound I feel with the winter squash tucked away in the greenhouse. That was then the greenhouse looked like this:




Now, it looks like this:


Tis the season of abundance. The fall crops are in – in our case thousands of pounds of winter squash, hundreds of pounds of potatoes and a modest haul of onions. The fading summer crops briefly overlap with fall ones, producing a goldmine of culinary possibility. Most Americans don’t regard the availability of butternut squash and juicy tomatoes at the same time as much of an achievement. But for the seasonal eater, this is really a special moment.

Like all good things, this one won’t last. Before the month is out, the last of those summer crops will be spent and we’ll be in full-on fall mode, with cold hardy plants and storage crops all that we have to draw on. Of course, this fills me with all kinds of anxiety, a condition exacerbated last week when I went to water in some seeds only to find the well had run dry.

I’m told this has been an unusually dry summer in Connecticut. I wouldn’t know, because before this season I never paid much attention to such things. But I do know our beds are so parched right now it’s impossible even to till them without watering them first – let alone seed radish or arugula that need to be kept consistently wet for days until germination. Problem is, there just isn’t any water.

Our well is shallow, just 17 feet deep, and as predicted by the well specialist I consulted in the spring, it has run out. So we’re left with the house well — a much larger reservoir but one we are allowed to use only about an hour a day. We now have hoses run across 400 feet of pasture and use a spray nozzle to water. It’s not a very sophisticated operation, and it hardly feels abundant, but right now it’s all that stands between me and multiple crop failures.


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A shmita year: Why we need to ‘give it a rest’ in 5775

by dan pine, j. staff


Adam Berman is about to give his Berkeley farmland a break.

Rye and other cover crops that have been planted at Urban Adamah, the nonprofit Jewish educational farm he directs, will draw nitrogen out of the atmosphere over the winter and return it to the soil, rejuvenating it.

The timing is not coincidental. Shmita — a Torah commandment that requires croplands in Israel to lie fallow every seventh year (shmita means “release” in Hebrew) — begins on Rosh Hashanah, at sundown on Wednesday, Sept. 24.

coverSept19_2014Besides resting the land, Jews may not eat anything sown or grown in Israel during the shmita year. They may eat only from perennial plants or wild edibles — though anyone may take crops growing untended on private lands. Also, personal debts must be forgiven if the debtor so requests.

This is how shmita has been observed for centuries by observant Jews in the Holy Land. When it comes to agriculture, property and social inequality, shmita provides the ultimate clean slate.

“Shmita is the most economically, environmentally and socially radical idea in the Torah, hands down,” Berman said.

This year, there is a concerted effort in some circles to extend the principles of shmita beyond the letter of the law. Metaphorically, Jews are finding new ways to embrace the idea of lying fallow.

“Shmita is a comment on what society should look like,” Berman said. “If we took it literally and applied it in a meaningful way to the nonagrarian society we now inhabit, it would have profound impact.”

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In the California Desert, Wilderness Torah Takes Judaism Back to Nature

Founder Zelig Golden, an environmental lawyer turned rabbi-in-training, tries ‘to reconnect the Jewish people’ to the earth

By Merissa Nathan Gerson for Tablet Magazine

Shortly after he finished law school in 2007, Zelig Golden went on a “vision quest” in California’s White Mountains with Rites of Passage. Although it was “a religiously universal program,” Golden said, he had “what turned out to be a very powerful Jewish experience.”

It began as a 10-day group trip in the wilderness, at an altitude of 10,000 feet in the high desert, but the focus was on preparing for three days and nights Golden would spend alone afterward. “I was guided to go spend three days and three nights fasting and praying,” he recalled. He intended to reevaluate his “work in the world” because he’d decided that being an environmental lawyer wasn’t satisfying enough. “I came back with a very simple vision,” he said. “I wanted to connect my people to the earth.”

By “my people,” Golden meant the Jews. Two and a half months later, he turned his vision into reality, organizing the first “Sukkot on the Farm” in Dixon, Calif. “It was a little festival,” he said, “not so organized but well-intentioned.” A small, informal group of Bay Area Jews camped out at the edge of a vegetable field, where they prayed, built a sukkah, learned Torah, and toured the farm. Out of this festival, Wilderness Torah was eventually born—a Berkeley-based group Golden calls “a manifestation of this vision to reconnect the Jewish people to this thing we were once deeply connected to.”

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Check out Jvillage’s High Holiday+    page.  While you're at it, check out our High Holidays Holiday Spotlight Kit for ideas, crafts, recipes, etc.. 

Green Your Yom Kippur, and Make It Last

by Rachel Cemansky for HowStuffWorks

Celebrating Yom Kippur means a day of not eating or drinking, using electricity, running water, or driving. The Day of Atonement is a green-as-you-can-get kind of holiday, but to go the extra mile, here are a few (if obvious) ways to make the holiday even greener, and make the green lifestyle lessons last.

Tips for green ways to break fast:

1. Make it a vegetarian or vegan meal.

2. Which means skipping the lox, but if you just can't, make sure it's harvested as sustainably as possible.

3. Buy locally-made bread and if you're doing cream cheese, buy organic dairy.

4. Use petroleum-free candles, or make your own.

5. Make your own honey cake, and by all means use local honey—the bees need your help.

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While you're at it, check out our High Holidays Holiday Spotlight Kit for ideas, crafts, recipes, etc.

A Very Green Rosh Hashanah

Lisa Borden/The Blog, Huffington Post Canada

On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the New Year and give thanks for the creation of our world. We dedicate time to family and friends and we reflect on our past year and celebrate the start of the new year. It's the perfect time to make new goals for the year ahead and try to do better for yourself, your family, and our world.

Shopping for the holidays
Be eco-"logical" about planning your family gatherings right from the get-go. Shopping locally for an organic Rosh Hashanah meal, apples and honey will not only help support your neighbours and community, but you will also serve kind, chemical and pesticide-free food. And don't forget, shopping tools can be as important as the food itself. What a shame it is to carry home glorious food in a toxic throwaway.

Tote the right thing
Plastic bags are a thing of the past, but if you're toting a 99 cent reusable, you could be doing more harm than good. Non-woven polypropylene reusable bags are made from the same stuff as disposable plastic bags -- petroleum (ick!) and have been found to have high levels of lead. It's time to carry on (literally!). Arm yourself with a bag that will last you all of your shopping to come. Try a fair-trade bag that is lab-tested, lead-free and is washable.

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Check out Jvillage’s High Holiday+    page.  While you're at it, check out our High Holidays Holiday Kit; all kinds of great ideas for the whole family.

Hebrew Union College Going Green

Hannah Dreyfus The Jewish Week

Liz Piper-Goldberg, fifth-year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), has been passionate about the environment since grade school. As a teenager, she encouraged members of her community to stop using incandescent light bulbs. For Piper-Goldberg, it was like a light bulb went off — a compact fluorescent light bulb, that is.

“I realized how a simple change at the most basic level of our lives can translate into big savings for us, and for the environment,” said Piper-Goldberg, 27.

Today, she’s bringing simple, significant changes to the HUC-JIR’s New York campus. Thanks to a grant from the Gendler Grapevine Project, Piper-Goldberg helped spearhead the Greening Initiative, a project to revamp the campus’ food system in order to minimize waste. The project will launch this fall.

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From SolarEnergy.com

It stands to reason that solar panels are far more effective when they’re clear of dirt and dust that can block the sun’s energy-giving rays. But just how does one clean all those hundreds, even thousands of panels that make up the world’s largest solar power plants? After all, that’s a lot of time, manpower and cost.

Fortunately, some Israeli engineers have come up with a novel idea. Well, perhaps not so novel. After all, the Jetsons did have Rosie way back in 1962. Perhaps inspired by the Hanna-Barbera-created housemaid, engineers with Israel-based Ecoppia have created a small army of solar panel cleaning robots that provide daily, water-free, energy independent cleaning to the Ketura Sun Solar Park, making it the world’s first completely autonomously-cleaned solar energy park.

The video above shows a few of the 100 centrally controlled automatons in action, cleaning the Ketura park’s massive solar panels. Set to work at nighttime, the robots move up and down aluminum frames and use microfiber pads and controlled air flows to push dirt from the surface of the panels. During the day, they’re charged using solar energy generated by the plant. Previously, the panels, which cover a 20-acre site, were cleaned just nine times a year because it was such a laborious and expensive ordeal. Meanwhile, all that dirt and dust covering the panels between cleanings made for sub-optimal efficiency at the plant.

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