Splash some color on your plate! It's National Nutrition Month and the theme is "Eat Right with Color." This month the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics wants you to make healthy choices by incorporating a colorful variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins and dairy into your meals every day.

ADA encourages all Americans to take time during National Nutrition Month to look at their eating patterns and begin to make the small improvements that, over time, add up to significant health benefits. ~ Judith C. Rodriguez, President, ADA

National Nutrition Month

National Nutrition Month is an annual campaign sponsored by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics to promote nutrition awareness and education. It originated in 1973 as "National Nutrition Week" and expanded to the month-long observance in 1980 in response to growing public interest in nutrition. The theme changes each year, but it always focuses on the importance of making informed food choices and developing sound eating and physical activity habits.
Eat Right with Color

This year's theme, "Eat Right with Color," provides an easy way to focus on improving eating habits — simply include plenty of color on your plate!

Adding a splash of colorful seasonal foods to your plate makes for more than just a festive meal. A rainbow of foods creates a palette of nutrients, each with a different bundle of potential benefits for a healthful eating plan. ~ Karen Ansel, ADA Spokeperson

For more tips, visit the National Nutrition Month section. Plenty of resources are available, including recipes, interactive games, nutrition education resources and the NNM blog. Learn ways to promote the event in your own community and check out the NNM catalog for gifts and promotional items.

In a town in Southern New Mexico, a huge Algae production facility has opened up. It is producing large quantities of Algae for Bio fuel. High oil prices, competing demands between foods and other biofuel sources, and the world food crisis, have ignited interest in Algaculture (farming Algae) for making vegetable oil, biodeisel, bioethanol, biogasoline, biomethanol, biobutanol and other biofuels, using land that is not suitable for agriculture.

Algae fuels’ many attractive characteristics are: They do not affect fresh water resources, they can be produced using ocean and waste water, and they are biodegradable and relatively harmless to the environment if spilled. Algae cost more per unit mass (as of 2010, food grade algae costs ~$5000/ton), due to high capital and operating costs, yet are claimed to yield between 10 and 100 times more energy per unit area than other second-generation biofuel crops.

One biofuels company has claimed that Algae can produce more oil in an area the size of a two car garage than a football field of soybeans, because almost the entire algal organism can use sunlight to produce lipids, or oil. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that if algae fuel replaced all the petroleum fuel in the United States, it would require 15,000 square miles (39,000 km2) which is only 0.42% of the U.S. map, or about half of the land area of Maine. This is less than 1⁄7 the area of corn harvested in the United States in 2000.

However, these claims remain unrealized, commercially. According to the head of the Algae Biomass Organization, Algae fuel can reach price parity with oil in 2018 if granted production tax credits. Currently most research into efficient algal-oil production is being done in the private sector, but predictions from small-scale production experiments bear out that using algae to produce biodiesel may be the only viable method by which to produce enough automotive fuel to replace current world diesel usage.

If Algae-derived biodiesel were to replace the annual global production of 1.1 billion tons of conventional diesel then a land mass of 57.3 million hectares would be required, which would be highly favorable compared to other biofuels. The benefits of Algae biofuel are obvious, and it will no doubt replace Soy and Corn as the world standard bio fuel source. All you need is water, light and a little bit of mineral nutrient (just like most plants).

Things are blooming here at DLFN in February! It’s not quite Spring as there is still some chill in the air lingering from this winter’s shadow.

While most of the country is waist deep in a winter "wonderland", we here in Southern California are eager to help our customers begin their outdoor spring crops. Technically, Spring doesn’t arrive for another month, but around here, with the temperatures creeping up to the 60’s we are already in our cool spring season.

In anticipation of our customer's needs, we have already seeded our plug transplant trays with Tomatoes, Peppers and Lettuce. Soon enough you can be rocking with our 100% Organic plugs.

Happy cool spring everyone! I hope you get out there soon and get your hands dirty, just like Bill and Martha from Moonrise Farms have.

You can start getting ready for Spring by mixing some SubCulture-M into your soil and watering with Floralicious Plus to keep your fungi and bacteria happy.