What is Farmlab?

For a more complete answer, the team behind the Not A Cornfield project invites you to check back again with us in late winter / early spring 2007.

In the meantime, please feel free to visit our bare-bones, temporary blog.

Cornhenge, in bloom

Cornhenge, the Not A Cornfield metabolic sculpture, was in full-bloom not long ago. For anyone who missed it in-person, at left is a shot of the flora -- and fauna -- that continues to populate the piece.

Gerardo Vaquero Rosas -- agriculturalist, magician, maestro -- has worked wonders tending to the marigolds and other flowers and plants; even after recent rain, cold, and necessary trimmings, Cornhenge remains awash in orange-ish and yellowish hues.

The metabolic sculpture is, as ever, located on the grounds of the Los Angeles State Historic Park, and is open to the general public during regular state park hours.

Under Spring Is Site of Assemblymember's Swearing-In

Large flags stood sentinel, balloons were festooned, belly dancers undulated, the buffet line and birthday cake beckoned, energetic speeches were offered, and various salutations and congratulations were exchanged last night at Under Spring.

The reason for all the hub-bub? The nascent community space was utilized by the Honorable Kevin de Leon and his campaign staff and supporters as the venue of choice for de Leon's Los Angeles swearing-in as the newly elected California State Assemblymember of the 45h District.

Quoting from the press release sent out from the assemblymember's office:

"LOS ANGELES, Dec. 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Los Angeles community organizations and area leaders are sponsoring an inauguration ceremony for newly elected Assemblymember Kevin de Leon representing the Forty-Fifth Assembly District.
California Supreme Court Justice Moreno will administer the oath of office to Assemblymember Kevin de Leon. Following the inauguration ceremony, there will be entertainment featuring Mariachi Monumental de America, Elisa Chacon, Danza Teocatl, Lion Dancers and Armenian Dancers.

"The event will take place at Under Spring, an outdoor community space created as a part of Not a Cornfield, an art project created by artist Lauren Bon and sponsored by the Annenberg Foundation. Not a Cornfield serves as a catalyst for a world-class park and advances the restoration of the Los Angeles River. The site is directly across from the Los Angeles Historic State Park."

Not mentioned above: The fine master-of-ceremonies turn put in by Herbert Siguenza, of Culture Clash.

NAC Team Members Attend Brownfields 2006 Conference

BOSTON, MASS. -- Three members of the Not A Cornfield team have just concluded attending the Brownfields 2006 conference. The annual gathering was co-sponsored by the federal EPA and the International City / County Management Association (ICMA). The Not A Cornfield team was invited to attend by a representative of the latter organization; she'd visited the NAC project grounds last year, during the Blue Phase. The NAC team was given a booth in the trade show portion of the event; and team members introduced and exhibited a pair of NAC short films created by our colleagues from the Echo Park Film Center. Afterwards, audience members with questions came to the front of the screening (or, really, conference) room and fired away. One woman wanted to know where she could purchase the videos. Another man wanted to talk about a different film, entirely. And a third gentleman, a Manhattanite, approached the team and asked, you name it, what can I do to help?

The NAC team attended Brownfields 2006 for the following three, among perhaps other, reasons:

1. To connect with municaplities, institutions, and others doing like-minded ecological, philanthropical, sociocultural and political work;

2. To Seek out other brownfields in the United States -- particularly in park-poor and underserved inner city areas -- in which to take on other large-scale, site-specific, imaginative brownfield-to-greenfield remediations and transformations; and

3. To gather addresses and maps of brownfields nationwide.

How'd all that go? What else did we see, and whom did we meet in Boston? And most importantly, what is the TerraSirch 300?

Check back with this blog in the coming week.** Right now, we're off to take a nap. Conventioneering can take a lot out of a blog.

**Update: We're awake now, but we're still absorbing some of what we saw, and learned. For more about what when on at the conference, the official web site should be useful.

La Ofrenda 2006 Announced -- Art + Music + Ceremony -- Nov. 2-5 @ Under Spring

THURSDAY, NOV 2 @ 5:45am
The general public is invited to join in honoring the Tongva ancestors at Cornhenge, the Metabolic sculpture, in the area previously know as Not A Cornfield. The indigenous community of Los Angeles honors its ancestors through this sunrise ceremony 5:45 a.m. Please join us. Bring your songs, your drums, your dances and your heart. We will go in procession from Cornhenge to the Under Spring area, where a public Ofrenda will be accessible for the community to place their flowers, candles, photos, or any other remembrance in the name of their loved ones.

This sunrise ceremony will commence the on-going activities at Under Spring for the next four days.

FRIDAY, NOV 3 @ 7:30pm-12:00am
LA OFRENDA EVENT:
Four distinct areas will offer a plethora of interactive events from, performance & visual artists, drumming circles, video/digital presentations, dances, live music, tamales, non-alcoholic beverages and more. Revolving around all this activity will be a Traditional Ofrenda for all who wish to remember their loved ones. You may place a picture, a momento, a candle or a flower to this collective community offering for the ancestors, to celebrate life.

On the beautiful Living Ofrenda and in honor of all who have had a death experience and lived to tell of it, you can join in dance, drumming, singing or merely admire all the awe inspiring work from a collective group of artists. Or if you wish to sit and contemplate life through the lense of video and digital works accompanied by the Sovereign Nation Drum. Or still yet sit and join the Grandmother Talking Circles and learn about the Tongva ancestors, and many other traditions of this land our Mother Earth.The living Ofrenda is an evolving collage open to everyone. So please bring photo copies of living people or whatever you want to add to the wall....

SATURDAY, NOV 4 @ 12-8pm
LA OFRENDA
The Ofrenda will be available for viewing from the hours of 12 noon – 8:00 pm
Fire circles and ambient music will make your viewing experience unforgettable.

SUNDAY, NOV. 5 @ 3:30pm-SUNSET
SUNSET CLOSING CEREMONY
Please do join us from 3:30 pm – sunset. The water drums, the dolphin dance and the serpentine dance will take you into realms that heretofore you have not experienced. This is an interactive ceremony. If you are present you will participate. Please bring your parents so you can know that they are celebrating life together with you.

Los Angeles State Historic Park Opens

The Los Angeles State Historic Park formally opened to the public on Saturday, September 23rd. Remarks by Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and State Parks Department officials, as well as live music and a faux train ride for children were among the festivities during the all-day opening.

The Los Angeles State Park is the 18-acre IPU, or interim use park, that will be in place until the permanent state park is built sometime in the future. Currently, three design teams are vying to be selected as park designer.

The Not A Cornfield project took place on the grounds of the Los Angeles State Park. Not A Cornfield occupied the entire acreage of the 32-acre site. Cornhendge, the Not A Cornfield metabolic monument, remains on the north end of the grounds, sprouting and verdant.

National Seed Distribution Trip Report

As spring turned to summer, not long ago, members of the Not A Cornfield project team left the NAC warehouse, heading east, on a national seed distribution trip. Team member Sarah McCabe files this travelogue:

"On Monday, June 19th several members of the Not A Cornfield team set off on a journey to Rosebud, a Lakota Indian reservation in South Dakota. Our mission was to help complete a ceremony house being built for the Lakota community and their medicine man Roy Stone. The trip there and back we used as an opportunity to plant our corn seeds in places where healing was needed.

"The first leg of the trip took us through the Mojave Desert where we visited the world’s first large scale thermoelectric power plant called Solar One. Finding it in disarray we decided to make it the site of our first symbolic corn planting.

"We then traveled through Nevada and Utah. In Green River, UT we found a uranium tailings dump site, open and exposed, right next to the town’s water tower. Again, we planted seeds of healing on the nearby riverbank.

"In Colorado we we’re warmly welcomed at the Naropa University in Boulder. After meeting with Anne Waldman and giving a talk to a group of poetry students we planted a corn garden on the campus grounds. Here we learned of yet another heavily uranium contaminated site near Boulder called Rocky Flats. We paid a visit, filmed and planted corn.

"On the fifth day we arrived in Rosebud, South Dakota. The second poorest county in the United States, this reservation is home to the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. This reservation and the adjacent Pine Ridge hold a rich history and promise for the future. This is the home of the descendants of famous Indian heroes such as Sitting Bull, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse. These leaders gave their lives to defend their families and Native American way of life. A lifestyle that seemed to have no value a century ago in the Industrial Revolution but now appears to have great value in a world facing grave environmental challenges.
Only hours after we arrived we were ushered into a sweat lodge being held to help heal the medicine man, Roy Stone himself. This was and incredible experience for all of us and we got to enjoy many sweat lodges during our stay.

"Over the next five days we worked beside the Volunteer Network International team in a race against time to finish the Ceremony House before our scheduled departure on June 30th. Learning about dry walling, electrical work, plastering and fake logs as we went, we put the finishing touches on a house that had been largely built the previous year. True to our roots, the NAC team also put their efforts towards building a fence with the colors of the medicine wheel around a spiral cornfield that had been planted with NAC corn months before.

"On the final day there was a large celebration to honor those who had worked on the house. Music was made, gifts were shared… the wife of Roy Stone danced and sang like she hadn’t done in years. It was a sweet departure knowing that we had made friends among the Lakota and this would not be our last journey to these people and this land. -- Sarah McCabe, for the Not A Cornfield blog

Math, Art, and Commodity (One More Time!)

Last week, we calculated the value of the crop placed up on the Wall of Corn.

That wall was filled up, and then stripped down of the then-drying corn months ago. Some of that corn no longer remains with us.

So today, we move closer to home and ask, what's the possible commodities market value of the kernels remaining here at Under Spring?

(The math follows -- and please e-mail us to tell us if we've gone wrong.)

We recently estimated that there are 60 million kernels stored here.

If one bushel equals the number of kernels on about 90 ears of corn, and if the average Not A Cornfield ear would seem to have about 500 kernels -- we've been counting -- then one bushel equals 45,500 kernels.

60 million divided by 45,000 equals: 1,333.33 bushels.

Going back to the July 26 corn commodities price of $2.3950 per bushel, we multiply that number by the number of bushels in the warehouse and come up with a total of: $3,193.33.

As art, is the project now worth less?

Value, Art, and Commodity (More Fun With Math)

Not too long ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a report with a sassy illustration and the clever, intriguing headline, "How Corn Became Like Vegas."

The subtitle: "Rising Oil Prices, Zest for Ethanol Heat Up the Futures Markets; Hedging on the 'Ags' Maze?"

This July 26 Money & Investing section cover story touched on many of the issues that Not A Cornfield visitors and team members have discussed publicly.

Not mentioned in the piece -- nor should it have been -- was a discourse about the value of art. As a team that's spoken many times about the conceptual, and literal, comparison between the economic return possible from selling post-harvest kernels as "art" or as "agricultural," we figured we better break out the Not A Cornfield commodities calculator again.

The story, written by Ann Davis, notes that the price of corn futures had risen 11% this year, up to $2.3950 per bushel. A bushel, the story explains, is "equal to 56 pounds of shelled corn, or the number of kernels on about 90 ears of corn."

A previous post on this blog detailed that a regular visitor to NAC counted 133,694 ears of corn hanging on the project's then-Wall of Corn fenceline. **UPDATED BELOW**

That fence, then, by our calculations contained 1,485.49 bushels.

Which meant that as of July 25, anyway, the portion of the NAC crop that wound up on the fence could have fetched $3,557.75 on the commodities market.

What, though, if it was sold as art?

Fun With Math - Kernels Galore

Having a free few moments, this blog set out today to determine how many total corn kernels are currently housed at the NAC warehouse.

The answer: 60 million.

The math was based on the fact that it took NAC team members 1 1/3 ag bins loaded with kernels in order to fill 1,000 large bags.

So: 16 ag bins x 750 large bags per ag bin x 5,000 kernels per large bag= 60,000,000 total kernels.

That includes 1,000,000 now in the large bags on display in the warehouse.

For an inefficient food crop like corn that only produces one or two ears per plant per cycle, 60 million is a lot of seeds. Of course, corn needs lots of irrigation and
can't really propagate without human help.

The above, far as we can figure, are facts.

What follows is more summer movie-style, unrelastic guestimation. Stuff that, for this blog anyway, is fun to wonder about...

If the above means that an acre of corn can multiply itself by a factor of 60 per cycle, then in 5 cycles 28 acres (hypothetically) exponentially multiplies to 21.7 billion acres.

To put 21.7 billion acres into perspective:

The entire North American continent (includes Central America and the Caribbean) is 6.1 billion acres.
The entire land surface of THE WORLD is 36 billion acres.

Have a nice day.