Agriculture

San Ysidro 2013

AFSC helped organize the annual San Ysidro Day celebration with partners the South Valley Acequia Assoication, La Plazita Institute, and Agri-Cultura Network. This tradition, held in New Mexico for 400 years, celebrates San Ysidro, the patron saint of farmers. The ceremony includes blessings of the land and water by indigenous elders of the Isleta Pueblo, Dine, Red Wolf Clan as well as Catholics and Penitente brothers.

The Iowa International Center is sponsoring a showing of Harvest of Grief, a film highlighting the plight of Indian farmers driven to suicide by globalization.  This program is free and open to the public.

The hour-long documentary examines a wave of suicides among farmers, mostly in the Punjab region of India. Once considered the country’s prosperous breadbasket, the region has seen, by some accounts, as many as 40,000 suicides over the past 20 years.

You are what you eat -- and everything on your plate is corn.

This is the third film in the “Examining Modern Life” series, sponsored by the AFSC, and concerns the topics of Iowa farming, government subsidies, and nutrition.

Engrossing and eye-opening, King Corn is a fun and crusading journey into the digestive tract of our fast-food nation.  Fueled by curiosity and a dash of naiveté, college buddies Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis return to their ancestral home of Greene, Iowa, to find out how the modest corn kernel conquered America.