Thanks for commenting, Carolyn, and welcome home! I bet your husband is very happy that you’re back.

I gotta ask – have we met in person? Northfield was a good home for 4 years.

And great work on the service project.

Your photos are gorgeous, and I appreciate the link. Do you mind if I use more of your pictures in future posts? And it’s so funny that your site is called LowellHandmade because just last night, Negin taught me how to sew.

“On the other side of it, we badly need initiatives like this. Studies have shown that soil is depleted in agribusiness fields and the nutritional content is lower than stated.

“Personally my family eats more vegetables when we belong to a CSA. They taste better, too and we put some up for the winter. We are less sick and our food costs are lower. We also get organic chickens through a local family and our milk (raw) through a local farmer.

“We need to be connected to our food and gardens, whether they are sponsored by Walmart or not.”

“Hi, Lev, I’ll answer part of your question.

“To me, it seems Walmart is trying to improve its self image and get a share of the upper middle class market share. It was well known that they had filled the low and working class niche well enough a few years ago and were looking to continue to expand their market share (or else die, according to the capitalistic manta).

“They recently partnershiped with the Detroit Public Schools to provide job training in their suburb stores (because there are are not Walmarts in the vast grocery-free wastelands of Detroit-they bus the Detroit kids out to the suburbs for ‘cultural exchange’ This makes me wonder if it’s a job training option in the notoriously white suburbs). This is a horrible and horrifying idea for a myriad of reasons not to be discussed here.

“The issue I have with that is it is still not fixing the systemic problems it has with it’s workers being in the negative income tax bracket even working full time,without health care and unable to unionize for a seat at the table.

“A study was done comparing Costco and Sam’s Club (which has the same employment paradigm as Walmart’s) employees performance. Costco employees outsell Walmart employees by a significant amount(I can look up the numbers if you want). They are treated better and paid more and in return the employees perform better. So also Walmart is not practicing evidence-based management, they are still trying to get around their human assets problem.

“While I don’t doubt that there are positive things to be learned by Walmart’s supporting Agile Agriculture, I am also seeing that Walmart has NOT changed their overall treatment of their employees, or its aggressive business model of growth at the expense of the community and competition, or its ludicrously high pay to top officials and stock holders (granted those figures are not the highest in the market-Target’s CEO is paid more). Changing those things will be the mark of real change in Walmart’s initiatives. Until then I am highly suspect.”

I`m glad that solar power is playing a huge part in this mess. Hopefully people will understand that it`s not only used or meant for the tree huggers.