FRESH DAILY NEWSLETTER 18TH - 25TH AUGUST - FOOD AND HEALTH

Good Day,


I hope this reaches you in good health and happiness. This past weeks have been extremely busy weeks for us. The communities we are delivering to are expanding and our well laid delivery plans would need to be re designed to get maximum efficiency on our end which would translate to less fuel consumption and more off time for my staff. I sincerely apologize to those estates we have not been able to keep to a set delivery dates. I PROMISE WE WOULD BE BETTER. We have been able to sign up a new restaurant in Wuse II . They are called Uncle D's restaurant and wholly dedicated to selling organically grown food, the owner is a chef passionate about food it's worth giving them a try at some point.


During last weeks deliveries I have learnt alot about food and health from some of you. It's always taken for granted that food is the best form of medicine, I dedicate this weeks edition of our newsletter to re-enforce that amongst our community. The rates at which stomach ulcers, high blood pressure and diabetes is been diagnosed amongst us has reached epidemic proportions. BP tablets are been bought like sweets, I met a 22 year old patient in a hospital diagnosed with high blood pressure and diabetes. He looked healthy and virile as far as my eyes could see by the prognosis was damning. The good news is that since the problem is our food, we can always reverse the trend. Taking time out to plan a proper diet and delve deeper into our food is the best preventive and curative measures we can take. I heard someone say we are the most overfed and yet under-nourished generation and I totally agree. The food we eat needs to have the right nutrients and released properly without exposing us to toxins. Vegetables and fruits are vital to a diet that promotes optimum health. You can find out more about what vegetables are would aid you in claiming back your health from here

Our range of vegetables are expanding thanks to a generous contribution of organic seeds delivered to us by one of our supporters. We now have more rocket salad seeds which by the way Americans call Aragula for some weird reason, more varieties of lettuce, more tomatoes and yellow pepper. Yes we finally have yellow sweet peppers and in a couple of months we would be filling your boxes with an extra burst of sunshine.


Thanks a lot for choosing us and continue claim back your health and food systems. Building sustainable communities and a better world can only be achieved when we have optimum health.

Peace, Love and Blessings

Kabir Onimisi ADEMOH

FRESH DAILY NEWSLETTER 26th July - 2nd August

Good Day To You,


This week I have had various enquiries about if we are planning to OR currently rearing any chickens, are they organic? Local or free range? What my views are on imported frozen chicken and so much more.


Firstly, I find imported frozen chicken distasteful. Its insulting and demoralizing to think that in Abuja alone we have over 3 million birds of various varieties growing under varied methods for a population of just over a million people. That is in simplistic terms, 2 chickens to one individual every week. The capacity to produce birds locally surely should make importation of birds a silly silly idea. We actually don't need the government to place a ban on imported chickens for us, we just all need to say no to chicken pumped full of preservatives transported from thousands of miles away to but this people out of business. Common sense and common will of a people would always defeat an imposed version of reality. If you are not worried about the economic and health reasons, you should be worried about the taste. It takes a lot more effort and spicematics to get your preserved frozen chicken tasting like a bird that has been sourced locally without any preservatives. Why? Because the preservatives keep the birds inert. Immune to intrusion of any foreign particles be it pathogens or your lovely spices. It's a victory for physical sciences but a defeat for the chefs, foodies and culinary experts. Save your spices, save your health and buy your chickens from a poultry you trust. Trust been the keyword.


We at Fresh Daily currently stock just about enough birds for the consumption of my family and a few immediate neighbors. My birds are not organically sourced but are reared organically and semi-intensive. We feed them corn grown on our farm and never use growth hormones or antibiotics. For that reason it has been hard to stick large quantities to include with our weekly vegetable boxes. I have had alot of suggestions from qmonhst our community of running a CSA for the birds. This is where you buy shares on the poultry pen, that goes towards feeding and rearing the chicks and you get your dividends paid off as chickens supplied to your home over a two month period. For example paying #12,000 would yield a return of 10 birds supplied over a 2 month period. We are still working on the plan and would see how viable it would be. It would eventually all boil down to what the collective community of Fresh Daily users decide.

On the vegetable front, it keeps looking greener and redder. The Veronica Tomatoes have ursurped the Eva Tomatoes. Eva got to the end of her harvest cycle so you would notice a fuller, rounder and redder version of tomatos in your vegetable boxes for the next month. Our lettuce has been a resounding success. The mixed pack lettuce has yielded so much colour to our growing tunnel, that Taiwo my head Agronomist and I have become full time selfie-ists.

I hope you all enjoy your vegetables and the rain this week. Keep thinking and living green. We at Fresh Daily wish you health, happiness and blessings. Thank you for choosing us.


Best Regards

Kabir Onimisi ADEMOH

CELEBRATING UNITED NATIONS WORLD YOUTH SKILLS DEVELOPMENT DAY

Training young people to become market gardeners and poultry farmers is an innovative answer to stimulating agricultural growth, reducing high unemployment, crime and generating income for self-improvement.
Our training imparts valuable and applicable life skills for all involved.

Entrepreneurial skills will give participants real-life simulations and applications to the agriculture sector. The impact of operating a self-sufficient agricultural training centre like ours will ensure a sustainable revenue stream for youths, while also creating a ‘real-life’ holistic training environment for participants. The Foundation currently has 48 young individuals that have participated in the training so far but plans to train 3000 individuals per quarter (every 3 months) in one centre which would equate to 12,000 youths in a year. In training one individual to create their own market garden, they have the potential to create employment for three individuals when we consider the multiplier effect this would mean we would be able to create a minimum of 36,000 jobs from a year of training in just one centre. Empowering the youth and stimulating the agriculture sector may provoke a high impact value on alleviating poverty and creating a life-long learning generation.

Growing food for our community is our skill and we join the rest of the world to celebrate the UNITED NATIONS WORLD YOUTH SKILL DEVELOPMENT DAY.

NEWSLETTER 12TH - 19TH July - Touching The Soil

Good Day To You,

Staying in touch with the soil is the surest way to shape our world.
With the fast pace of life nowadays, it's easy to feel like we are been shaped by a world that holds little regard for our dearest opinions. There is more and more of everything giving us less than ever before.

Lucky for you and me, we have found a way to shape our lives, our communities and consequently our world through the most abundant tool available to us - the soil. The soil holds all of our collective history and information. The soil yields us our food and through reconnecting with the farmers and farms that provide our food we get to touch the soil again, appreciate it's beauty, and it's value to our existence.

Farming sustainably and bio-intensively means we respect the soil and try to preserve it's properties. The dangers of our conventional food consumption and production patterns is apparent in the pollution of our soil. We wouldn't need to think outside the box into hydroponics and genetic engineering , if we amend and preserve the soil properly as farmers.
This is not an easy task and at times it's not cheap. Fresh Daily constantly encounters losses because we refuse to use pesticides, herbicides, growth hormones and inorganic fertilizers when manure, composting and careful planning can still produce tasty, healthy crops for our families. We like all other organic farmers have decided to maintain the integrity of the earth we have to grow not bigger but better. So sometimes we would incur loss of crops, some weeks we would have less quantities but always, always you would be guaranteed tasty, healthy food delivered to your door.

The soil is our tool of shaping that world one meal at a time to mirror our own will and beliefs. I hope you enjoy your produce this week and before you rinse your vegetables take a moment to appreciate the soil caked on your delivery.
Wishing you all health, happiness and blessings

Regards

Kabir Onimisi Ademoh

Of Red Gold and Our Food System

After the madness, the season after. As a few baskets of tomatoes are trickling into our market stands one can only hope that the lessons of this tomato scarcity are not lost with the euphoria of seeing the worlds most popular fruit on display again.

We all heard the stories, we all experienced it in our own unique way. In my house we replaced the efficient rice and stew with the festive jollof rice but we were not celebrating. A different kind of party was starting that would really make me take a hard look again at our food value chain. As a farmer and an avid foodie, the picture was grim. The tomato scarcity was buzzing on social media, conventional media and every neighborhood media. Some people started the Tomatoeless stew, Tomatoeless jollof and all sorts of Tomatoeless recipes. Bride price was calculated in tomato baskets!! It was just insane. I found it quite telling that the buzz about the scarcity was everywhere while not much was said two months earlier when tomato farmers and sellers were cursing their luck with the glut of products in the market. Big baskets of tomatoes were going for 2000 naira and nobody raised any alarm. Why was it so suddenly abundant,? How were tomato growers faring? Can this process be sustained? The truth is after every season of abundance invariably comes scarcity.

The main cause of the scarcity was attributed to a form of tomato disease ravaging the three key Northern states that grows majority of the countries tomatos and all other vegetables for that matter. Also there were stories of massive paste manufacturing companies opening up across the country competiting with the open market for tomatoes. All this factors combined to create the worst tomato scarcity that the Nigerian economy had experienced. The main lesson I drew from this scarcity was that 1. Today it's tomato tommorow it could be rice, ground nut oil, egusi, yam or palm oil 2. Large scale agribusiness isn't a silver bullet to solving the issues of food security.

Our politicians have collectively made our consciousness irritated by certain words. Food security is one of such words. But don't be fooled by the hype the threat is real. Our food systems needs to be designed to be able to withstand any disruption to the production or supply pattern. The continued emphasis on monocropping by big Agro firms is not just dangerous but diabolical. Monocropping increases the chance of pest infestations, disease proliferation and destruction of soil structure. The other more serious issues is of our disjointed food systems. When the food we eat comes from miles away, their is a high level of threat to our food security. Not only is food with high mileage bad for the environment it creates a level of ignorance amongst the consumers leaving them susceptible to eating anything you put on their plates without thought of how it was produced, where and how the rice on your plate affects the livelihood of the grower. The disconnect between grower and food consumer damages our environment our economy and more importantly our health.

The tomato scarcity for one made alot of people start asking questions about Tomatoes, what is happening? Is this from Jos? Kano? Or a greenhouse down the road? I explained with relish the various cultivars of tomatoes their taste and texture differences with keen interest from buyers because tomato had suddenly become red gold. The various factors that shape our food prices became objects of interests to the consumers. Which can only be a good thing. Don't get me wrong, this scarcity was not a blessing but rather an opportunity to restructure our food system in this country and all over the globe to gain resilience. Various innovations are coming into agriculture which can help. The rise of Community Structured Agriculture (CSA) where farmers grow in smaller micro farms to cater for the need of a specific community is becoming popular and essential. These farmers boycott the traditional middletraders I. E. Supermarkets, distributors, wholesalers to sell directly to homes and restaurants. There is also a case for farming using urban spaces that lay to waste thereby distributing production closer to the consumer. This is very much in tune with the 21st century approach to production where the consumer becomes a prosumer - a producer-consumer. They dictate the production process and products to their own needs and tastes. Agriculture has adopted this model with high level of success. Feeding people locally helps create resilient communities and generate a deeper level of connection that is absent in the current food system. If you know the family that would eat your chicken, you would think twice about what antibiotics or feeds you use on the birds. The other rewarding aspect of locally produced food with low mileage is that food prices are relatively stable all season long and not subject to other factors like fuel costs.

There is no silver-bullet for food security challenges but a diversified approach and more public inclusiveness in the food systems would help avoid another tomato scarcity like the one we just experienced. It's time for our communities to claim back our food value chain.

- KOA

BioDigester Project At Rije Village CONTINUATION

It started as a whimsical idea passed between two professionals over linkedIn and now two years later we are a team of almost 30 individuals working tirelessly across language barriers, personal challenges and differing work schedule to bring electricity to an off grid community. Rije residents are impatiently waiting for our innovation to kick off. The first phase of the project is finished. We have finished with the biodigester now waiting on our methane generator and the electric metres to start our mini-grids to the community.

We have managed to identify three individuals in the community who would be managing this project for their community once we up and leave them with their new innovation. Its been a beautiful struggle but we are just starting. there are still over 100 off grid communities in Kuje Area Council alone. With almost 600 families per community and preliminary energy audit showing that families use an estimated $20 a month on power needs, that equates to $12, 000, 000 worth of energy consumption not catered for by the national grid. the numbers are mind-blowing but what is even more mind blowing is how quickly technology can be adopted. the energy profile of this small community would triple in the first month of our grid going live.

KOA

Workers Day, Tomatoes and Dangote

Happy Worker's day to all my people with jobs and hoping to get jobs. It has been a long weekend to unwind and re-evaluate career choices.
Workers Day also called Labour Day is a globally accepted day to acknowledge the role of the labour force in our development and how they gained their right to proper working conditions, welfare and recognition.

A large number of us are without jobs and bear very bleak prospects of finding any. This day thus takes on extra significance in the face of gross youth unemployment we are witnessing. Those who dare to take the entrepreneurial route are lucky to have something worthwhile doing but please do not forget that your workers welfare is non-negotiable. All over the world we witness that it's different scenarios but our struggle is universal : better jobs, better lives, fairer practices, basic needs in a complex time.

Talking of complex times, the prices of tomato is at an all time right now. The quantities I used to buy for 250 naira now retails for 1500 naira. Tomato traders all over the country are feeling the pinch. My preliminary research shows that massive losses incurred during storage as usual have spiked tomato prices again. Some other reasons I am hearing is that the Dangote tomato processing plant has kicked off production buying large volumes directly from tomato growers in the north thereby creating a scarcity in the open market. My heart jumps with joy as Africa's richest man invests in agriculture but I would send a cautionary note of how big scale industrial agriculture might not be a silver bullet for food security. A diversified agricultural chain where both small and large scale agribusiness can thrive would lend resilience to our food system.

Salute to all workers all over the world, salute to Mr Dangote and salute to everyone striving to create a fairer, Humane and positive world.

KOA

Four Agricultural Fields With Goods Job Prospects

When you hear the word “agriculture,” images of a farmer atop his tractor may come to mind, but there are a slew of other related professions to pursue, from engineering to economics.

Earlier this year, a study led by Purdue University determined that in the next five years there would be close to 60,000 job openings annually in fields related to agriculture, food, the environment, and renewable natural resources. We spoke to three professors at Purdue—a major research university located in West Lafayette, Indiana, which is consistently ranked as having one of the top agricultural sciences programs in the country (and world for that matter)—on which professions are emerging in this field.
Agricultural and Biological Engineering

Agricultural engineers can focus on machine design, design, and processes of getting food produced at the farm to your plate, or environmental challenges working with soil, water, and air, says Bernard Engel, head of Purdue’s Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. Careers include working for equipment manufactures in the agricultural, forestry, construction, and military industries. On the environmental and natural resources end, there are jobs with various government agencies or consulting firms.

Engel says the all of the programs in his department are in high demand right now. “Many of the advances in agriculture right now are coming in this area. The future looks bright as well, given expectations of even more technology being used in agriculture in the future,” he says in an email.

Biological engineers deal with issues that include food processes, things like making food taste better or making it last longer; and cellular and biomolecular engineering, which concerns “finding better ways to get value from by-products or getting energy from biological materials.” The food industry is a major employer. Engel says there is also a demand in research and development for these graduates, not only in the food and pharmaceutical industries, but also in genetic engineering in plants.

Agricultural Systems Management graduates help make agricultural technology easier to understand and use, says Engel, and students in this area are “highly sought after in careers with machinery, grain handling, and precision technology.”

Soil Science

Students can focus on soil ecology, chemistry, physics, conservation, and soil landscapes—mapping the soil attributes of a certain area—among other fields of study. John Graveel, an agronomy professor and director of the Natural Resources and Environmental Science program at Purdue, says job prospects for soil scientists right now are very strong.

“Soil science students are getting some training in geographical information systems [GIS],” Graveel tells Modern Farmer in a phone interview. (GIS is a computer system that is used for collecting and displaying data as it relates to geographic points on the Earth’s surface.) “It’s hugely in demand right now by consulting firms to have people on staff who know how to do GIS.”

Agricultural Economics

Agricultural economics is the practice of applying economic principles to public and private decisions made in the agricultural sector, explains Kenneth Foster, head of Purdue’s Agricultural Economics Department. The field includes sales and marketing, agribusiness, farm management, policy making, and natural resource and energy economics.

Job prospects are “pretty strong” for graduates in this “heavily data and metric driven” field, Foster says. “We placed 98 percent of our graduates last May by the end of the summer. Well over 100 students got jobs.”

Pro tip: Foster says because we’re entering an era of data-driven decision making, “the students who can position themselves to be strong from an analytical and problem-solving perspective are going to have an edge in the market.”

All three professors agree on what students interested in these fields should be focusing on: math and science. You get a bonus for taking part in extracurricular activities that help build leadership, communication, and organizational skills.

Startups

Finally, let’s not forget the entrepreneurs out there who are tech savvy and like to go it alone. Agricultural technology startups are blooming right now. Last year the industry grew by 170 percent and had more than $2.36 billion in investment, according to the website TechCrunch.

“I think the agricultural tech industry is doing well because it’s been overlooked for awhile. I think that’s really going to change and it’s going to continue to grow,” says Jason Aramburu, founder and CEO of Edyn, a startup that makes a smart watering sensor for crops.


By Andrew Amelinckx for Modern Farmer