It was a go, go, go day yesterday starting with a quick breakfast and then out the door by 9:00. We went to the nursing home up in Boonville where my mother once lived, and we sang. The kids did a great 50 Nifty United States and then the Pledge and the Star Spangled Banner, and we hugged and introduced ourselves to the residents and then we were off again. I was proud of all the kids who sang so well. I heard Addie especially.

We arrived at Lincoln National Park, did the rest room thing and then visited the museum where Kanin was the child who named the ax as the most important tool the pioneers had, and he won a Klondike bar. David also won a Klondike bar.

We ran up to the grave site of Lincoln’s mother, and some of the kids were keen to know who was buried under the little markers. I told them children; that a family did not have just one or two kids, but many children – as many as 15 or 17 kids in a tiny home, and many of them would die because there was no medical help back then. Lots of the older girls were very interested in this.

We then plowed then through the woods to the picnic station. We then went up to the farm and visited with Sam the Ranger who gave the kids a lesson in furs and animals. Very apt for our program this summer. The boys loved the animal skins.

We visited all the new baby animals, the chickens were everywhere and then we were off again for Monte Casino with a very hungry bunch. Remember these kids like to eat all day long!

Monte Casino is a small shrine to Our Lady of Monte Casino high in the hills just east of St. Meinrad. My children made their First Holy Communions there and it’s near and dear to me. We had a big lunch of ham, turkey and cheese sandwiches, cheese, peanut butter and jelly or honey, egg salad, tuna salad, homemade cookies, carrots and apples and pickles and chips. They ate the WHOLE thing.

Then it was off again to St. Meinrad and a tour of this Romanesque church. St. Meinrad is a Benedictine Archabby and one of only seven in the whole world. It’s a beautiful big place and as close to a Medieval castle as the kids are going to get in this neck of the woods. It’s always so much fun to compare Lincoln to St. Meinrad. One is the work of one man; the other the work of a community. Interesting.

We toured the Chapter Room at St. Meinrad which is quite magnificent. The Chapter Room is where monks four times a year confess their Monastic faults and are corrected by the Archabbot. It’s also a place where the community of monks can get together and hash out difficulties.

We went to the big garden with the circulating water and the kids just loved it. We walked through the garden which is lush and beautifully planted. Then it was off to visit some of my friends in the graveyard. I think I know about 1/4 of them. I always like to visit this very peaceful place when I’m up at St. Meinrad. The kids were fascinated. Wyatt asked who was buried in the tomb under the crucifix.

This was a grand field trip for a first one. I was proud of the kids who for the most part behaved very well. There was some running in the church, but they settled down and behaved as well as they usually do. Next week is the Louisville Zoo.

Comment: A reverse of what was in the news a few months ago.

AAUW Sees No Educational Crisis for Boys

By Debra Viadero

Even though more women and girls are getting college degrees and scoring in the top ranks on national math tests than was the case in the 1970s, their academic gains have not come at the expense of boys, says a report released today by the American Association of University Women.

Some researchers and advocates have made the case in recent years for a “boys’ crisis” in education, pointing out, for instance, that boys have begun to trail girls on key academic indicators, such as in rates of enrollment in and graduation from college.

But the AAUW, the Washington-based group that sparked a national debate about gender disparities in education with a report issued 16 years ago, contends bluntly in its new report that the fears about boys are overstated.

“There is no boys’ crisis,” Linda D. Hallman, the group’s executive director, said in an interview. “On average, both boys’ and girls’ education performance has improved, and all boats rise on the same tide.”

The new report, “Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education,” also argues for taking a closer look at gender disparities in education and breaking down statistical trends by students’ racial, ethnic, and family-income levels, as well as by gender.

While girls still outperform boys overall on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading, for example, a closer inspection shows that the gaps are most pronounced and most consistent between white male and female students. Girls outscored boys on 29 of the 30 NAEP reading tests given since 1975.

Hispanic girls outperformed Hispanic boys on fewer than half of those tests, the report says. African-American girls outscored their male counterparts on 24 of the 30 tests.

Nonetheless, the report says, gender differences within racial and ethnic groups are small compared with the academic gaps that separate students of different income levels or different racial and ethnic groups.

“We need to understand better how girls in these disadvantaged groups are faring, just as we need to understand how boys in these disadvantaged groups are faring,” said Catherine Hill, the AAUW’s director of research and a study co-author.

Findings Criticized

ACT English Mean Score by Gender & Race/Ethnicity 1995-2007

SOURCE: American Association of University Women

The report drew pointed criticism, though, from Judith S. Kleinfeld, a researcher from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, who has written on the problems of boys.

“No one makes the absurd argument that `the progress of girls has come at the expense of boys,’ ” Ms. Kleinfeld, a psychology professor, said in an e-mail message to Education Week. “The policy issue is whether boys have gender-specific educational and emotional problems which need attention. Boys most certainly do.”

The problem with the AAUW study, she said, is that it focuses on a narrow set of academic indicators, ignoring key areas in which boys are particularly floundering. In K-12 schools, for example, boys get lower grades, on average, than their female counterparts, get assigned disproportionately to special education classes, and account for the majority of suspensions and expulsions, she said.

ACT Mathematics Mean Score by Gender & Race/Ethnicity, 1995-2007

SOURCE: American Association of University Women

Suicide rates for young men between the ages of 20 to 24 are six times higher than they are for women in that age group, she added, and young men are more prone to suffer from alcoholism, conduct disorders, and other externalizing psychiatric disorders.

Ms. Hill said the AAUW project intentionally focused on commonly used academic indicators, such as the federally sponsored NAEP and the SAT and ACT college-entrance exams, in part because they allow researchers to track results over time and because the entrance exams play a gatekeeping function for higher education.

Boys Ahead on Some Tests

Among the report’s other findings:

• While average scores for both male and female students have steadily risen on the SAT and the ACT since the 1990s, young men still maintain a slight edge over women overall. They outscore women on both the verbal and the math portions of the SAT and maintain a slightly higher composite score on the ACT. The changes may reflect that fact that higher numbers of women than men elect to take those tests, the report suggests.

• Although girls have made big gains at all grade levels on the NAEP in mathematics, a slight gender gap still favors boys in that subject.

• In states where girls score comparatively high on NAEP, boys also score high. The reverse is also true: Boys and girls both score low in low-scoring NAEP states.

• Even though women have been earning more bachelor’s degrees than men since 1982, more men of all races are earning college degrees today in the United States than at any time in history. Both trends reflect an 82 percent increase, from 1970 to 2005, in the overall size of the college-educated population.

• While women outnumber men in college, there is no gender gap between men and women entering college immediately after high school graduation. According to 2005 enrollment figures, 66 percent of the young women and 65 percent of the men who graduated from high school that year enrolled in college the following fall.

Women Spurred by Pay Gap?

The study also found, however, that the enrollment picture changes markedly among the 50 percent of undergraduate students who are older or financially independent from their parents. Among that group, women outnumber men by a ratio of 2-to-1. One-third of African-American women who eventually graduate from college enroll when they are 25 or older, according to the study.

One possible reason for that disparity, Ms. Hallman and Ms. Hill said, are the pay inequities that women encounter in the workplace. In 2005, earnings for women were 77 percent of men’s earnings, according to a 2007 AAUW analysis. The pay disparities persist, the researchers contend, even when the analysis takes into account factors that might account for those differences, such as varying levels of experience or the fact that women often take time out from the workplace to raise children.

Annual salaries are higher, though, and the gender gap, smaller, for women with college degrees, the report says.

“We see a lot of gains for women in education, but they’re not doing so well in the workplace,” said Ms. Hallman, “and that is ultimately one of the reasons people go back to get a college degree.”

It’s been a marvelous break. The weather has been superb. I’ve been able to spend a lot fewer hours at school this break than ever before and that allows me to start the summer program fresh and in a much better frame of mind.

There is a lot that goes into the summer program. The first order of business is always a major clean up from the school year. Classrooms need to be re-arranged, the cloak room re-done, the kitchen re-stocked with summer foods. The cleaning is always hours and hours. This year we have Miss Amy to thank for most of the cleaning. She came in over the break several times and cleaned. I can’t tell you how much this helps Edith and I personally. The cleaning has traditionally belonged to Edith and I, and this year we were able to do some of the extras because of Miss Amy.

I was able to get some time with my family and not have to run to school several hours a day to make sure that the floors were washed, and the carpets were washed, and the animal room was cleaned which Edith did this break.

I was able to put in more of the school garden which will make a big difference this summer in food costs. I was also able to develop some summer food projects and activity projects that would otherwise have had to take a back seat. The wave of exhaustion that always follows an intense period like the end of the year or the holiday season simply because of the work that needs to be done between tasks has been eliminated because of the volunteer action of Miss Amy.

Running the school is a difficult business to begin with, and the kind of unselfish help with cleaning and organizing Miss Amy is willing to provide goes a long way with me. Amy has a very mature work ethic. She’s the kind of employee who says, “It needs to be done; might as well be me.” And then she hits the ground running. If you ask her about her work, she always shrugs her shoulders and says, “It’s done.”

Summer is a very active time for us. Planning the activities, phone calls, trip planning, finance planning, schedules for teachers, new students, returning students all take time and effort and a lot of thought. Couple that with the huge task of cleaning, and the usual final product is “Pooped” to start out the game.

This year we will start the program with nearly 50 children. That’s a lot of kids for us. It’s a huge responsibility to organize people. You will find our teaching schedule changed. I usually open the school every day at 6:00. This summer on Mondays and Thursdays, I will be closing the school and letting Amy and Edith open. I will work on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings and all day on Friday of course, for field trips.

Miss Kelly will be at school all day on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

Miss Molly will be at school Monday and Thursday mornings.

Mr. Tom will be at school every day mid morning through mid afternoon and all day on Friday

Miss Lindsay will be at school Monday and Thursday afternoons.

Miss Amy will work Monday and Thursday mornings, and Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and all day on Friday.

And we are introducing a new young lady, Miss Kendra, who will work every afternoon. Miss Kendra is a licensed teacher who is coming to the GS for a summer fun break from public school. We welcome her with open arms. I have known her family for a long time and she is Miss Kelly’s neighbor and good friend.

This time management means a much better summer for the children who will have fresh happy committed teachers, and you can’t beat that.

This summer Mr. Tom has planned some “Advanced Learning” projects with the older children. He is also committed to do the summer reading program at Willard Library.

Miss Kendra is eager to do some more music with the kids. She and Amy will join forces.

Mrs. St. Louis is going to do a lot of art with different groups of kids.

I will be doing domestic arts which will include the time management of good housekeeping. My girls will put snack to bake and then we will adjourn to do some needlework.

It should be a knock out summer.

Ideas on Creative and Practical IQ Underlie New Tests of Giftedness

Comment: My husband told me that I’m out of the box and he thinks that is not a good thing. I love this article because these people are finally dragging the dull and often stuffy tests out of the box, and that’s where I am. My personal opinion is that it’s not “If you have the intelligence to figure it out, but WILL you actually figure it out?” There are so many really “smart” people out there who will never use their intelligence for anything. Intelligence is like anything else meant to be used. Are you the type of person who has talents and gifts and digs a hole in the back yard of your life and deposits them there, or are you the type of person who uses what you have to the maximum? Some people don’t know how to use their intelligence, and this test might be one that actually allows educators to answer those questions.

By Debra Viadero

Robert J. Sternberg often writes about a lecture-style psychology course he took as a college freshman in which he got a C. “There is a famous Sternberg in psychology,” the professor told him at the time, “and it looks like there won’t be another.”

To Mr. Sternberg, the vignette illustrates that conventional assessments don’t measure all the abilities students need to succeed in life.

A nationally known psychologist, he has spent much of his career designing new measures that might more accurately capture the full range of students’ intellectual potential at the university level.

Now, a team of Yale University researchers is using the same ideas to rethink the tests that schools use to identify pupils for gifted and talented programs in elementary schools.

The team’s Aurora Battery, named for the colorful spectrums created by the northern and southern lights, is being translated and tested with tens of thousands of 9- to 12-year-olds, not only in the United States, but also in England, India, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and other countries.

If the preliminary results from those tests are borne out, its developers say, the new assessment could yield a very different pool of gifted students—one that includes a higher proportion of students from traditionally underrepresented minority groups than is often the case now.

“This test has the potential to capture a more diverse population of students with a more varied and better-qualified array of skills,” said Elena L. Grigorenko, a psychology professor and the leader of the Yale study team in New Haven, Conn.

Tapping Talents
Yale University researchers are pilot-testing an assessment for identifying gifted and talented children that taps intellectual skills other than those captured by traditional intelligence tests. The new tests include questions, such as the one below, designed to measure students’ creativity.

SOURCE: Child Study Center, Yale UniversityThe new battery is based on Mr. Sternberg’s definition of “successful intelligence,” which holds that people who succeed in the real world possess a combination of practical, creative, and analytical skills.

Traditional intelligence tests, these researchers say, measure only a narrow subset: memory and analytical skills. Also known as “g” for general intellectual ability, those skills come in handy for comparing and contrasting, analyzing, judging, and classifying, and they are the kinds of abilities that teachers tend to value and emphasize in the classroom.

If people who score high on such measures succeed later on in life—and studies show that they often do—it’s partly because the educational system is geared to reward their particular mental skills, Mr. Sternberg said.

Validating Results
Yet plenty of people succeed without ever fitting that pattern—people like Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson or filmmaker Steven Spielberg, both of whom were high school dropouts.

With the Aurora assessments, though, scholars hope to get a read on the skills that make the Bransons and Spielbergs of the world successful, as well as the academic skills that intelligence tests have traditionally measured.

In its entirety, Aurora is a comprehensive battery that includes a group-administered paper-and-pencil test, a parent interview, a scale for teacher rating of students, and some observation items. The paper-and-pencil test gauges creativity, for instance, by asking students to imagine what objects might say to one another if they could talk, or to generate a story plot to fit an abstract illustration on a children’s-book cover.

A question assessing students’ practical skills with numbers directs test-takers to draw a line mapping the shortest route between a friend’s house and a movie theater.

With the data now coming in from around the world, researchers hope to validate the tests for widespread use. They are comparing children’s Aurora scores with those they get on more-traditional screening tests for gifted programs, such as the Cognitive Abilities Tests or the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children, and looking at grades and teacher ratings of students.

Ms. Grigorenko said the early results show that children really do run the gamut in performance along different intellectual dimensions.

“They can be high on analytical skills and low on creative or practical,” she said. “The second thing is that you tend to close the achievement gap when you pay attention to kids’ skills other than analytical and memory skills.”

A similar pattern of results is emerging, meanwhile, from Project Kaleidoscope, an experiment that Mr. Sternberg initiated at Tufts University, in Medford, Mass., where he is now the dean of the school of arts and sciences.

Starting in the 2006-07 academic year, the school supplemented its freshman application process with optional essay questions designed to assess applicants’ wisdom and creative potential. Applicants could choose to write an essay on “confessions of a middle school bully,” for example, or imagine what would have happened had Rosa Parks not helped ignite the civil rights movement by declining to give up her seat on the bus.

Admissions Affected?
Contrary to concerns that the extra questions would deter students, the number of applicants rose that year. In the spring, Tufts admitted 30 percent more black students and 15 percent more Hispanic students than it had the previous year.

Average SAT scores for incoming freshmen increased, too, according to Mr. Sternberg. First-semester grades and survey results also show that the admitted students fared as well, academically and socially, as their predecessors had the year before.

“The lesson I’ve learned in Kaleidoscope is that the kinds of questions you ask predicate the answer you get,” said Lee A. Coffin, the dean of undergraduate admissions at Tufts. “If you just ask, ‘How did you spend your summer?’ you get some terrific answers and you get some terrible ones, but you don’t know that creativity is teased out in that question.”

Mr. Coffin said it was harder to tell, though, whether the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the freshman class was due to Kaleidoscope or to Tufts’ efforts to boost financial aid and move to a need-blind admission process.

The Kaleidoscope project followed on the heels of the Rainbow Project, a set of tests for creative and practical thinking that Mr. Sternberg piloted with support from the College Board, the New York City-based organization that sponsors the SAT and Advanced Placement programs.

In 2001, the Rainbow tests were given to 1,013 high school students and college freshmen from 15 schools. Researchers compared the results with students’ SAT scores and examined students’ grades in high school and in their first year of college. (“Researchers Call SAT Alternative Better Predictor of College Success,” Jan. 29, 2003.)

Not a Replacement
Compared with the SAT alone, Mr. Sternberg found, the Rainbow tests doubled the accuracy with which researchers were able to predict students’ first-year grades. Score gaps between students of different racial and ethnic groups were also smaller on the broader test than they were on the SAT.

Mr. Sternberg and his research partners got similar results a few years earlier when they administered a practical-skills test to students applying to the graduate business school at the University of Michigan. He’s also testing efforts to embed Rainbow-style questions in the Advanced Placement tests the College Board offers in psychology, physics, and statistics.

“We don’t see these kinds of tests as a replacement for the analytical tests, because those abilities do matter for success in school,” said Mr. Sternberg. “So the mistake is not in using the analytical tests. It’s in overusing them.”

Mr. Sternberg’s ideas are not without their critics in academia. One is Linda S. Gottfredson, an education professor at the University of Delaware, in Newark. She contends that practical and creative abilities are really skills or achievements, rather than independent intelligences.

“What we find is that bright people have an edge in virtually everything,” she said. “No one has demonstrated that there is more than one highly general mental ability.”

‘Long Haul’
Whether the newer, broader tests will win a permanent place in schools or in college-admissions processes is also open to debate.

The College Board pulled the plug on the Rainbow Project two years ago, choosing instead to work on validating its own writing test, according to Alana Klein, a spokeswoman for the board.

She said the board got pushback on the Rainbow tests from admissions officers at some of its member institutions. At Tufts, the Kaleidoscope questions remain on admissions applications for now. Mr. Coffin said the university will track results for a few more years before deciding whether to make the questions permanent.

Mr. Sternberg’s ideas, like the theory of “multiple intelligences” that Harvard University’s Howard Gardner espouses, attract strong supporters at the K-12 level, though.

The Park School, a small, progressive private school in Buffalo, N.Y., twice invited Kaleidoscope researchers to administer the Aurora battery to students, even though results can’t yet be shared with the school, students, or parents.

“We wanted to encourage parents to value creative and practical intelligence,” said Donald Grace, the head of school. “We know we’re in it for the long haul.”

Coverage of education research is supported in part by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.

I was sent this video and thought it was interesting:

I had a nice talk with one of my favorite parents yesterday about the play-education scheme at the Garden School. We both agreed that the kids are tired of desk work, and because of the splendid weather, they are just dying to get outside all the time and simply play.

This is a “good” for kids. They have learned what they have learned, and now it’s time to let that gel while they are simply playing. Play actually teaches better than work. How often have you learned from work in comparison to learned from play. When a human is fully engaged in something they enjoy, it becomes play.

In addition, what we have found over the years is that every time we take a break from desk time, when we return, the kids seem to understand it all very clearly. As Edith says, the longer the public system stays in the classroom the less they learn. That’s true, so these recess breaks are the glue and hinges of a good education.

Play is a God word. It’s the image of full joy. Play comes out of love which is an expression of full joy. Capturing that joy this week in pictures for a special project has been a snap. Edith has been photographing the kids and it’s her best work by far. But the kids have been so happy and so ready for new things, that their faces reflect that happiness.

Today is going to be a special and wonderful day. We are still working on summer because it’s going to be quite a show. We have planned and planned and we hope the kids have a ball. I’m sorry gas is so high. We are negotiating now about trips. We may not be able to do the Nashville trip, but we will indeed do something fun.

Today we will have our 30 minute awards program and then go to the playground for a cookout. We hope our parents will come and enjoy it. It starts at 3:00. Please bring a small desert or salad or pasta or chip and dip to share. We are serving hot dogs compliments of Phoebe’s grandparents.

See you later!

Several parents have asked about our summer in school program. Here’s how it works. On Mondays and Thursdays, we’re at school. We’ll have breakfast as usual, and then recess, because the temperature will rise and make it too hot to go out comfortably much later.

After morning recess, we will come in for some kind of class time. We will use the classrooms for smaller groups and the children will do science projects, geography, spelling bees, writing competitions, puzzles, maze races, math bees and anything we can find to continue classroom learning.

We’ll have play time and lunch and then try a brief recess out doors again so we can indulge in Popsicles. There could be water play as well. Then in the later afternoon, we’ll come in again and break into smaller groups again for more projects.

I will be at school on Monday and Thursday afternoons, and I will be taking the older girls and those girls who are interested for domestic arts. We’ll learn cross stitch this year and do a lot of baking. If they were older, I’d teach them traditional English smocking, but we’ll see. I think some flower pressing and some sewing and perhaps some lace making will fill the ticket. These are all the things I’m good at and want to share with the kids.

Mr. Tom will be taking some of the kids into the garden with him this summer. But because of yesterday and all the apple bud picking, that number has been dramatically reduced!

We will focus on geology, and horticulture, and drama. There’s a neat combination.

I’d like to do some in school plays this year – sort of work out what we are reading.

Every summer is different because every summer there is a different set of kids, so accomplishing anything fits into the general profile of the kids. This is a particularly young group with some older kids thrown in. The younger kids will get mostly play. But they love indoor play, so that’s not a problem. That leaves teachers free to really teach the older children.

Yesterday we had a call from a lady who loves our program and called to ask if we still pray. Edith said that we “still pray” as if our prayer time is a momentary lapse of some kind. All the things we do, we do as an attempt to well round a child. Children exposed to every kind of thing know more, can adapt better to new situations, and are more mentally elastic than children who are separated from the world and left in a mommy and daddy pristine box that is only exposed to “the right things.”

I always gave my grade school children the option of participating in those activities the school offered that some parents found questionable. I trusted the school and the good sense of the educators I found there. I also trusted my children. As a Catholic, we are taught to revere all that is true and holy. That means stretching sometimes. I neither encouraged nor expected nor refused nor negated these events. What we did do was talk about these things after, and we as a family came to understand the truth from the fictions in the world.

New places offer new ideas, new topics, new ways of thinking. If a child is forbidden or does not have these opportunities at the early childhood stage, he does not learn how to learn. A child who does not learn how to learn early will not learn to learn well and could be a real blockhead. That means he will always fumble and stumble with new ideas and that’s a shame.

A good foundation comes from home, but at the same time, offering ideas, new things, new concepts, new subjects is the job of good teaching. We hope parents will love our in school summer program this summer. We hope that children will be able to take home much of what they have learned.

This Week!

I can’t believe it’s the last week of school!

It’s amazing how fast this has gone this year.

This week on Friday we will be having our Awards Celebration at 3:00.

Children will be given their awards.

Some of them will be promoted to the next class.

At 3:30 we will have a cook out and picnic.

Phoebe’s grandparents are supplying the hot dogs.

Parents are asked to bring a covered dish like beans or applesauce – your child’s favorite.

Dismissal is whenever.

Children MUST have an adult at school for the awards ceremony.

Please let us know about any difficulty.

The Garden School will be closed on Memorial Day, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Our summer program begins May 29.

Please check your child’s graduation folder for summer information.

Questions? Please ask.

I found this and thought it might be fun to use while at work. I tried it and it’s really a nice little relaxing exercise that takes a lot of stress and strain away. I’m going to try to get the kids to do this. This man is a yogi who has been a yoga teacher 21 years.

From Food Navigator.com

Comment: something new and delicious!

Golden Peanut launches organic lines on mainstream demand
By Clarisse Douaud

Major US peanut and peanut ingredient supplier the Golden Peanut Company has launched two new organic peanut flours and an organic roasted peanut oil, to meet growing demand for both organic and nutritional finished products.

The Golden Peanut Company supplies processed peanuts and peanut derived ingredients, such as peanut flours, worldwide and is owned by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Alimenta USA.

The company has been preparing its production pipeline to produce organic ingredients for several years, but only now saw a strong enough level of demand for these products as the organic trend becomes mainstream.

“Customers started asking me for organic peanut flour and organic roasted peanut oil about four or five years ago – we actually got the plant organically certified about two years ago,” Bruce Kotz, vice president of specialty products with Golden Peanut, told FoodNavigator-USA.

“It was just recently that we had strong enough commitments from more than one customer that we made our first production run of the organic products.”
Golden Peanut contracts organic peanut farmers to supply its peanut shelling plant in Texas.

For the company, organic certification brings with it a premium positioning it can market along with the ingredients’ other attributes, including the taste profile and functionality associated with peanuts.

Golden Peanut is offering medium roast and dark roast organic peanut flours, which have 28 percent fat and 12 percent fat respectively, for adding nutritional and functional value to confectionery, baked goods, nutrition bars, dry seasoning blends, dry flavor systems, reduced fat peanut butters and sauces.

Peanut flour consists of between 40 and 50 percent protein depending on the fat level of the specific ingredient.

The company’s organic roasted aromatic peanut oil is designed for use as a base in peanut flavor systems, peanut butters, salad or cooking oil applications and other applications in which a processor wants to add a peanut flavor to a food.

The new peanut ingredient lines are both Organic Crop Improvement Association International (OCIA) and Kosher OU certified.

Though Golden Peanut exports internationally, the company foresees demand for its organics line at the domestic level in particular.

“I think most of the demand will come from US companies,” said Kotz.
The US organic market has shown phenomenal growth in recent years.

According to the Organic Trade Association’s 2007 Manufacturer Survey, 2006 sales in the US reached $16.7bn – a 21 percent increase on the previous year.

In its market research, Frost & Sullivan has linked this to consumer fears surrounding the effect of additives, chemicals and possible additives on their foods.

Organic foods bring with them a perception of health, and that also ties in with general healthy eating trends as consumers get wise to the dangers of obesity.

In terms of the landscape of the US organic market, Frost & Sullivan says the organic trend has moved out of its niche and is making an impact on the mainstream market.

It said in a recent report that several multinationals are “vying for strong positioning”, either by launching their own new organic ranges or by acquiring some of the smaller but successful brands that may have started out as small-scale, mom-and-pop operations in the niche days.