I might keep updating this if I have the time…we’ll see. But for right now, please check my new site for all of my new multimedia work, designs and writings!

Thanks,

James Saracini

Geez. Having a big-boy job really gets in the the way of this sort of thing.  When I find the time I’ll try and update this.

Regardless, thank you for checking it out.  All that is below is a portrait of my farm, things have changed a lot thanks to my folk’s hard work, which I’d like to be more a part of except I’ve been abducted by this big-boy job of mine.

Same thing with my other blog and my twitter: left dilapidated .

Please E-mail me (at jlsaracini@gmail.com) if you would be interested in seeing what I’ve done since May 2010.

Thanks again,

James Saracini

For better quality pictures click here for the Flickr set.

This afternoon I had an interview with Judd Slivka, the Communications Director for Missouri’s Department of Natural Resources.   This summer the DNR is employing eight interns to produce stories on all of Missouri’s approx. 85  State Parks for the rebuild of their website.  And I’m one of them!

(Here is information on the program and the State Parks Youth Corp.)

For four to six weeks this summer I’ll be hectically driving around the state for three days a week to visit parks and record video, take pictures and write stories about all the things to do in each park.  Then for two days I’ll edit and research.  Take two days off and repeat.

I can’t wait.  This is like a dream come true: what better way is there to  begin to a career in environmental/agricultural journalism?

I’ll keep you updated as I go along. Keep an eye out!

Sandhill Farm's Greenhouse-Josh Chittum

My friend Josh is a fellow Journalism student at MU. He is graduating in May with me and has done some great pieces on agriculture and the environment. Here is one that he sent me, which was published in Vox Magazine: Living in community

Are we competitors, he and I? In the spirit of community I dont think so: if they’ll read yours, they’ll read mine. It’d be unlikely that we would read Tom Wolfe it weren’t for Gay Talese or Thoreau if it weren’t for Emmerson.

I think that in many respects farming, and farming communities in general, function based on a similar kind of competition. Granted, there are examples of cut-throat business practices, but people treat each other better in the country based on the plain fact that neighbors today will mostly be neighbors tomorrow and the year after next.  The folks up the road might keep to themselves, but if my barn is burning, they’d be the first to help.  We’d do likewise for them.

So I was going to go to Columbia’s first farmer’s market of the year.  But because of the snow, I realized that my Pops would need my help seeding.  Plus the market would have been miserable, though the farmers wouldn’t have minded me bothering them.

So if you look to the right, you can see that below the house there is a strip cut through the forest.  That is actually a power line that has probably been the only bit of land that had been maintained for decades, apart from the fields that had been rented years ago.

Last fall the folks at Co-Mo Electric Cooperative came with two four-wheelers and sprayed the powerline to kill off all the saplings that were sprouting up.  At the time, we were a little bummed but realized it was an opportunity: we could seed in our own wildflower and grass mix on the dead ground.

So my father bought some great grass seed and two wildflower mixes which include plants like Butterfly Weed, Cone Flower, asters and larkspurs.  Hopefully we get a lot of those up, but my dad is more interested in some of the warm season grasses.

The beauty of seeding in the snow is twofold. First:  you get to see exactly where you’ve hit and while it snows, it covers where you’ve been so that if you need to hit it more than once you don’t have the old seed sitting there to confuse you.  The second is that it holds the seed really well and when it melts it helps drive the seed straight into the ground.  (And by the way, with this kind of grass, the cold doesn’t damage the seed.)

We would have used something a little more mechanical to seed, but that power line cuts straight up and over a our steepest hills so the less we drive over it the less rutting, and that means less erosion.  Plus we didn’t have the right equipment in when it snowed, naturally. So my father, sister and I broadcast by hand.  We staked out nine sections and measured out how much seed each section received.  Then we mixed the seed with sand to aid the throwing and make us more accurate. Once we got out there we’d walk our section over throwing with one hand and holding a bucket with the other.  After we made one whole pass, we came back with a second bucketful and repeated the process.

I’ll update you when it comes up.  While you wait: below are two pictures taken from atop our tallest hill looking north and south.

Power Line looking North

Power line looking South

a

Some interesting things to note

-80 acres in total
-30 acres of field and 50 of forest
-The notch out of the NE corner is an old cemetery
(containing some people born in 1850s)
-We are in the process of clearing 20 acres of cedar forests for Savanna Restoration for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).
(Highlighted in red.  Check out the pictures above to see how its going.)
-The west field is terraced but the right is not.
(In a few years when we are up on the wait list, we’ll put in terraces and catchment basins with aid from the government)

In Relation to Columbia, Mo:

In Relation to Prairie Home Conservation Area:

This project started as a sort of epiphany, which should have happened a lot sooner. It’s hard to not kick myself about not coming to it earlier. My life has always been graced by a lot of duality. My first sentence up there explains it pretty well: I’m a journalist and a farm boy. Now I’m not saying the two are mutually exclusive, but ask a farmer what he thinks about journalists or vice versa and you’ll see what I mean.

My love of nature and my love of writing were like two streams flowing down the same valley; they were bound to meet. So I realized that I could spend my life writing about and from nature. More specifically, it hit me as I was walking downtown in front of Shakespeare’s: I could work on a book while I freelance and spend much needed time working on my own farm.

It sounds great, and I’m trying hard not to be naïve about it. I’m sure you’ve heard, but now isn’t the greatest time to try and break into the journalism field. So I’m not being too rigid about what’s coming down the pike. Hell, I’ve even been thinking about going to spend some time in South Korea teaching English for three grand a month.

Regardless of what I end up doing, I think that my discovery process for the book would be interesting enough to warrant a blog, and it will help to keep up with the state of environmental/agricultural writing. Plus, it will be wonderful to have a record of my experiences researching as well as working on my farm and perhaps the farms of my sources. Talk about a useful notebook.

Now, it’s time to get to work!

Thank you—any help/tips would be much appreciated!
James Saracini

-9 a.m. at Saracini Farm
Sunday, March 7, 2010