A food share at an organic farm.
What's a Food Share?
Delicious farm fresh tomatoes ready for families to pick up Organic farmers can sell their produce to families by offering food shares, sometimes called "seasonal shares."
A family pays the farmer for a box of mixed vegetables every week from May until October, or whatever season they sign up for.
Farmer Rob, who grew the vegetables seen in this photo, is practicing community supported agriculture (CSA). Offering seasonal shares guarantees that Rob can pay for his organic gardening practices.
Close Eating healthy doesn't mean you have to sacrifice taste. In fact, most kids and parents agree that healthy food, like fresh fruit and veggies, taste better.
There are many ways to eat healthy. Have you heard of organic food? It's the fastest growing food movement in the country!
Organic food comes from farms that don't use synthetic pesticides or herbicides. The farmers take the time to weed their gardens. They use special tools to keep pests out.
Herbicides
Herbicides are used to kill unwanted plants. For a farmer, the unwanted plants are weeds.
Before herbicides were invented, farmers used other methods to control weeds. One method was tillage, which is how organic farmers prepare the soil for seeds.
Tillage means the farmers dig the soil with a tool like a plow or a hoe, and turn it over. The weeds' roots get exposed and die.
Close It often takes more time for an organic farmer to harvest the food. He doesn't always get as much from his garden. This is one of the reasons the food costs more.
If these farmers keep animals, they are allowed to graze freely in fields. This takes up much more space than keeping them fenced in or in small pens, which is the more common practice.
Read on to learn about two brothers who grow their own...
Give Me Room! Farmers that give their food animals room to graze use a method called called free ranging.
They don't feed them antibiotics or growth hormones.
These two kinds of drugs are used to get more meat from animals.
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