HOMEGROWN celebrates the imaginative, passionate people living HOMEGROWN
FAQ
How do I communicate with other members? There are a few ways! You can start a general conversation for everyone in the Forums. You can start a discussion with a more specific audience in mind in Groups. You can email any individual or select group of your friends, and you can comment on your friends’ pages – fun!
How do I know if my friends are already on HG.org? Start by looking for a group near you – you may find some new friends. Advanced search lets you search by name, interest and geographically - just be sure to put the state or city that you are looking for in quotation marks - ie: "CO" for Colorado, or "Portland" for a city. You can also have fun just searching random words and see who shows up.
What is “My Page” all about? Your page is your chance to tell others about yourself and your interests. Feel free to keep updating your page with new and interesting information – especially “Latest greatest meal cooked at home” and “My latest DIY project”.
Blog - You can start a blog on your page or link to an existing one. To link to an outside blog, simply click the RSS button at the very bottom of your page and enter the url of the site.
Friends – click on your friends’ pages every once in while to see what’s new with their pages. Add a comment, invite them to join a group or discussion you’re digging, maybe even get to know their friends – it’s just like Kindergarten recess, but with better soil!
Show and tell with photos and video – are you especially proud of a meal you made? Post a pic! Do you troll YouTube to find the weird and wonderful? Link it up!
Redecorating - Try moving around the different chunks of information on your page. For example, if you are using the RSS feed to bring your blog to your page, you can move it from the sidebar to the center area – try it, you might just like it!
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Want to get involved? Contact Cornelia - at - FarmAid dot org - or send a message through her page here
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Latest from FARM AID
Farm Aid Staff Analyze Grant Proposals
Farm Aid staff members have been busy reading grant proposals for the past few weeks. During our annual grant cycle this year we received 147 proposals, requesting more than $1.6 million. Of course, we wish we had that much to grant out to the wonderful projects we're reading about, but unfortunately that's not the case. And in what has been a tough economic year for Farm Aid and a really difficult year for family farmers, we're buckling down and really focusing on where our dollars can do the most good for family farmers. On the financial front, farmers entered 2009 at a disadvantage because of the credit crunch that made it hard for them to plant their crops and invest in any improvements on the farm. Dairy farmers continued to see abysmal milk prices that didn't cover even half of their cost of production--and prices have still not recovered. Pork and poultry producers suffered due to overproduction leading to low prices, and they too are still in that boat. And all farmers faced the highest production costs on record in many parts of the country.
On the weather front, farmers in the Northeast had to deal with late blight due to cool, wet weather, which wiped out tomato and some potato crops. The weather also meant farmers got a late start in the fields and as that weather pattern continued throughout the summer, crop growth was slow and in some cases, whole crops were lost. Come fall, there was more cold, wet weather across the country. In the Midwest, that made for some of the latest harvests in years, and in the Northeast, it led to apple crops left to rot in the orchards. These apples would normally be picked by families who come out in droves to pick their own, but this year they chose to stay warm and dry, rather than harvest the autumn fruit (which, because of all that rain, actually grew beautifully!).
You can see, then, why family farmers are foremost in our minds as we determine where Farm Aid's grant dollars will go this year. Once we get input from Willie and he approves our recommendations, we'll get the checks to him for his signature, and we'll get those checks out the door so that organizations across the country can do the grass-roots work of supporting family farmers all year long.
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