Day One at the SARE Conference: High Latitude No-Tillage

Bryce Wrigley: High-Latitude No-Tillage in Grain Production in Delta Junction

Bryce Wrigley owns and operates Wrigley Family Farms and the Alaska Flour Company in Delta Junction. He is the president of the Alaska Farm Bureau. 

Almost all grain production in Delta Junction is done with conventional tillage with fallowing and a rest crop. It looks all kempt and tidy, it's just dirt, and you can see things growing right away. But with no-till you can't see the new growth until the plants are about 10 inches high and get above the stubble. The no-till fields look kind of ratty and untidy, according to Wrigley. However, the problem with conventional tillage is it destroys the organic matter in the soil, and takes up soil in the wind. And wind is an issue in Delta.

After researching the type of drill to use, Wrigley and his wife, Jan, decided on the Cross-Slot (other companies seemed to all reference against this company).

Wrigley's reasons for doing no-till included: lack of labor requirement (his five kids had already left home), he wanted to maintain the value of his Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) lands which had been fallow for 25 years and so the carbon and quantity of organic matter in the soil, keep noxious weeds down, his area has a dry spell in spring & early summer which is counteracted by mulch on top of soil and old roots in the ground that hold moisture in the ground.

Challenges with no-till:

• slower soil warmup
• grass control is harder
• pest control issues: for the first five years he found pests increase but then it stabilizes

Benefits:

• maintains soil health
• better moisture retention
• no wind erosion
• saves labor
• less equipment
• less fuel
• fewer weeds

Even though emergence is a little later, the grain seems to catch up (the moisture in the ground seems to make the difference).

Breeding Workshop: trials, selections, breeding methods

Variety Trials: breeding to see what works (and what doesn't)

Jim Myers extolled the benefits of on-farm trials in his pre-conference workshop. It turns out that with participatory plant breeding, a cooperative arrangement that appeals to my grassroots heart, the variety trial is central to understanding and developing a new crop for a particular area. Myers held up a copy of an old AFES variety trial publication as an example of the kind of information breeders need to know and develop. He explained that it was important for:

• getting to know the crop
• expanding market potential, attracting new customers
• addressing crop stresses
• identifying organic info
• on-farm variety trials for vegetables, herbs, etc. (Here Myers talked about a publication from the Organic Seed Alliance that he authored about creating on-farm experimental designs for useful variety trials. The OSA has many helpful publications on everything from policy to seed production, worksheets and webinars.)

There are two basic trial methods, the observation trial and the replicated trial.

Observation trials are okay for evaluating disease resistance or discrete traits (color growth, habit, fruit size and shape, earliness), productivity, and adaptation to the locale. An example might be planting one-row plots of 10-30 feet. Observation trials are repeated over years in the same place.

Replication trials remove variation casused by differences in the local environment & provide repeated measures. They require randomization, such as in the variety's placement within the plot.

Siting a trial: get as uniform a section as possible. Consider soils, wind direction, even elevation, shade, moisture/wet or dry spots.

Traits to evaluate depend upon intended use and kind of crop: processing, fresh market, home garden/

On-farm trials in their simplest form: plant several varieties side by side and keep notes. This requires planning!

On-farm trials II:
Arrange among a group of farmers to grow an extended set of varieties, each grower grows a set on their farm. The advantage here is that a broader set can be looked, but it requires not only more planning but also coordination, and it should include a common variety to serve as a yardstick. Varietal performance may be affected by differences in location and cultural practices, too.

NOVIC (or, see the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative)

Mother Daughter Experimental Design: this is a statistical plot design that maximizes the amount of information obtained from diverse environments.

mother site: complete randomized block design with at least three replications
daughter sites: single replicates on at least three collaborating farms

Where to find the genetic variation?

From commercial sources:

• seed catalogs
• Native Seed Search
• Seed Savers Exchange

Exchange with other growers:

• seed swaps
• community seed banks/libraries/sanctuaries

USDA-NPGS (GRIN):

• Plant introduction collection (not a catalog: up to you to maintain seed or accession acquired)
• NSL # is storage of last resort, very hard to get
• PVP; has to be deposited in GRIN, but not available until patent runs out
• Tomato Genetic Resource Collection (genetic stocks housed at UC Davis, regular tomatoes housed at Geneva, New York)

Methods of recombination:

• natural crossing
• artificial 
• selection methods: mass selection, half-sib selection, bulk breeding, pedigree selection, single-seed descent, backcross breeding

Myers went into detail about each of these, but in particular the methods of selection. The technical aspects of the workshop were impressive and I will leave them aside, as the detail was considerable, but for those who are interested in pursuing breeding vegetable varieties, he recommended a few books, among them:

Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving, by Carol Deppe.

The Organic Seed Grower:  A Farmer's Guide to Vegetable Seed Production, by John Navazio.

There is also a book he co-edited but did not mention, Organic Crop Breeding.

Conference Workshop: On tomatoes and breeding lines: purple, yellow, rose

Jim Myers has worked on several species and varieties, but lately has caused a stir in the gardening world for his work with the Indigo Rose purple tomato, released by Oregon State University in 2012. To tomato lovers like me, this is pretty exciting, as it represents a new range of color and antioxidants available in these delicious fruit. But Myers was here to tell us about breeding vegetables in general. (Tomatoes, one of the most popular garden plants, are largely self-pollinating.)

Managing & selecting self-pollinated crops:

• one individual can represent variety, but more than one is better
• roguing and selection
• isolation distances

Maintaining stock seed:

• take 50-100 single plant selections from a finished variety
• grow as progeny rows, using say, 50 seeds from your plant selection
• inspect each plant for deviations, rogue off-type plants (roguing means weeding the rogues, the plants that don't conform to the type you are looking for)
• eliminate progeny rows with high frequency of off-types
• harvest by progeny row
• composite seed (mixed-up seed) from progeny rows to make up foundation seed
• grow every year or when regeneration of variety required

Roguing and selection

• source of off-types
• seed mixes
• outcrossing
• spontaneous mutation (can come off the same plant)

Examples of off-types

• ovals and strings in beans or peas
• plant / fruit / flower colors that don't match the variety
• growth habit
• pod fiber
• sterile off-types
• disease resistance (could be a good thing! or the off-type could show a lack of disease or pest resistance, and so not be so good)

Isolation distances

• depends on geography barriers, pollinators, prevailing winds
• can isolate in time as well as space
• no isolation needed between beans and peas (10-50 ft)
• isolation may be needed for: endive, escarole, lettuce; tomato and eggplant (10-50 ft)
• isolation required: peppers (75-100ft)

Myers also discussed the requirements for cross-pollinated crops and how they differ from self-pollinated crops. Cross-pollinators usually produce many small seeds, while self-pollinators usually produce a smaller amount of very large seeds (although this isn't a hard and fast rule). 

Managing & selecting cross-pollinated crops

• many individuals to prevent inbreeding
• maintenance
• isolation distances

maintaining stock seed:

• keep population sizes large: below 30-50 plants inbreeding depression will occur (plants will become weakened due to lack of sufficient genetic variety)
• grow variety in extreme isolation (caged production ensures isolation where land is limited)
• continuous mass selection (trimming extremes in variation)

Isolation distances:

• depends on geography barriers, pollinators, prevailing winds
• is the crop insect or wind pollinated?
• can isolate in time as well space (two weeks is offten enough time)
• Cole crops, mustard greens, radish, kale, turnips, cucurbits, scarlet runner beans, onions, carrots, celery, chicory: .5-2 mi
• sweet corn: 66-1,320 ft
• table beet & chard: 1-2- mi (same color) 1.5-3 if different color, 3-5 mile if different types
• spinach .5-3 miles

Unripe Indigo Rose tomato, an open-pollinated variety incorporating anthocyanins in the skin of its ripe fruit and released by Oregon State University. For more on the variety, see OSU's FAQ page. This and other, similar tomatoes are now available from many seed companies.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes have three growth habits, controlled by a single gene: determinate, indeterminate, and semi-determinate. For example, Micro Tom is a tiny variety about 8" tall developed using regular breeding methods, which grows no taller. This is a determinate variety. An indeterminate is the norm for tomatoes, and is the vining ever-growing habit that most tomatoes will exhibit. A semi-determinate will fall somewhere in between. One attendee showed quite a bit of interest in the idea of breeding a northern-adapted variety from a small tomato such as Micro Tom.

Kurt Wold, another of the attendees at the conference and owner of Pingo Farm and Zone 1 Grown seed company, has many Russian varieties. He suggested that these cold-weather, short-season, early tomatoes make a good place from which to start breeding for Alaska's needs. He also has a small determinate variety, which would be better to start from than Micro Tom, he said, as it is already adapted to a northern climate. Myers agreed: starting with a variety that already has some of the characteristics you want will save a lot of time.

Cooperative breeding projects

In concluding his workshop, Myers asked his audience if there were any cooperative breeding projects in which people might be interested in participating. The local turnip breeding project already has a lot of adherents, and several more signed up during the conference, but others expressed interest in tomatoes, sweet or flour corn, and fava beans.

CES will set up a listserve to notify members about participatory plant breeding efforts/inquiries. For more information, contact Steve Seefeldt, CES agriculture agent for the Fairbanks area. (474-2423)

At the 2014 Sustainable Agriculture Conference: Plant Breeding Workshop

This year's SARE conference, officially the 10th annual Alaska Sustainable Agriculture Conference, hosted by CES, is being held at the Wedgewood Visitor's Center in Fairbanks. The conferences start with a pre-conference workshop day, usually one full-day workshop and one or two half-day workshops. This year's workshops included one on plant breeding and one on record keeping and taxes for agricultural businesses.

I'm at the second half of the preconference workshop on participatory plant breeding, taught by Jim Myers of Oregon State University. We've been covering plant genetics and the difference between inbreeders (selfers) and outbreeders (crossers). It's a bit of an intense short course! I was taking notes earlier for this workshop, but lost them all on the laptop computer when I shut down for lunch. Lunch was pretty good, especially the potato chowder made from local potatoes! I went back for three helpings. (Several businesses contributed locally grown food to the lunch spread, including Basically Basil, Johnson's Family Farms, and several others. Unfortunately, I don't have the list. I'll post the company names here as I find out.)

Fortunately, Myers gave us all a CD with the full notes from his Horticulture 433 class, which is what he condensed part of his workshop from. It describes various systems of classification, from frost or cold tolerance, optimum temperature range, parts used for food, cultural groups, and botanical classification. There's 187 pages' worth of information on specific vegetables. It makes me want to cackle aloud.

Okay, so back to the notes I took from the workshop.

Myers gave us a short overview of the history of genetics and breeding in general, and how Gregor Mendel and his famous pea experiments were rediscovered in the early 1900s. We reviewed dominant and recessive genes, homozygosity and heterozygosity, and terms like allele and locus. Quite intense, as I said, and I won't go into the full details here (I can't remember them all, for one thing), but I'll explain a few things we went over.

In genetics, plants can be divided into those that have evolved such that they require no or very few crossing with other plants to maintain fertility and vigor (inbreeders or self-breeders, selfers for short), and those that do require it (out breeders or out crossers).

Inbreeders include:

• tomatoes
• eggplants
• most peppers
• beans (but not Scarlet Runner beans) (Fava beans are in between an inbreeder and an outbreeder, so one can use a small stock but not as small as true inbreeders.)
• peas 
• lettuces

Selfing a plant that is an F1 hybrid is a way to stabilize a variety for release. "F1" means the first generation between the cross between two distinct parents. Your hybrid starts out completely heterozygous (mixed genes of all sorts of traits). To make the plant breed true, or stabilize, breeders typically self 5 to 6 generations.

Nightshade family flowers in general have a higher percent of outcrossing, but still maintain selfing. Tomatoes may vary: some tomatoes have a style that sticks out beyond the flower (wild types), which will lend them to outcrossing.

Outcrossers include:

• mustards & brassicas, arugula
• melons & cucumbers, curcubits
• mustards have a sporophytic incompatibility: chemical self-pollination prevention
• corn (each seed has an individual silk down which pollen may travel)
• artichokes, daisies, sunflowers
• carrots, Queen Anne's Lace (protrandry: wind pollination)
• chenopod flowers
• onion family flowers: protrandry, vegetative bulblets (walking onions or Egyptian garlic also)

The Food Policy Conference: computers and workshops

I was having significant computer problems while in Portland (the laptop kept conking out) and the hotel computer wouldn't let me have more than one window open at a time. Very frustrating. However, now I am back and with excellent connectivity, so I can tell you all about the conference and easily link to the pertinent websites!

On the way down and back, I was reading Gary Paul Nabhan's book, Where Our Food Comes From.

So, here's the workshops and sessions I went to:

• Food Policy Advocacy 101: short course. I took a ton of notes on this half-day course. There was much discussion on strategy: constituents, allies, opponents, and targets. They mentioned an organization called the Midwest Academy, which trains people on how to organize for social change. They discussed what each of these elements were in a strategic advocacy campaign (constituents: those people you directly represent; allies: those who are on the ground for you; opponents: those who don't like what you represent and will work against you; targets: the specific people who can give you what you want). They described coalitions and recruitment, and how good communications, personal relationships, clear roles and responsibilities, transparency and accountability, a broad reach, and consensus-building are all important to making a coalition that works. In coalitions, formalized agreements can really help keep things clear and accountable. They recommended coalition letters, a memorandum of understanding between organizations, and formal agreements and titles for individual volunteers who build that coalition and make it work.
  

Throughout the conference my role in the library seemed most relevant, even though I was down there on behalf of food and agriculture organizations. This was because much of what I heard about was community organizing—work engaging the public and getting them involved in policy issues that directly affect them. I was pretty astounded that hardly anyone there had heard of the idea of a seed library (more on this later).

• Regional networking with the Canadians: lots of joking around (very politely!) by an impressively savvy bunch of food activists who were NOT happy about Stephen Harper and his government's potential impact on food policy.
• Food systems planning: this wasn't what it was advertised to be, and I and several other participants left it feeling quite shortchanged. Still, it was interesting, and the People's Budget came up in discussion.
• Building diverse local food policy leadership: this was basically about being inclusive, avoiding discrimination and privileging, and using a nifty tool called an interrelationship diagram. This workshop was conducted by Kolu Zigbi, of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, and Rodrigo Rodriguez of the Southwest Organizing Project. These two were dynamic, interesting speakers, and excellent workshop teachers.
  
• Planning for the future of food: this was a presentation of four strategic action plans at four different levels, from neighborhood to city to county to state. The plans were Food for Growth, from Buffalo's West Side in New York state; Transforming the Oakland Food System (California); Multnomah Food Action Plan: Grow and Thrive 2025 (Multnomah County, Oregon); and the Michigan Good Food Charter.
• Accessing and using food data to support collaborative policy decisions: this was all about a great GIS mapping and database synthesis project by CARES. Really powerful tool, but only as good as the resource databases (which seem to be considerably out of date in Alaska, but this may change now that the 2010 Census is done).
• Local food systems: this was pretty frustrating until I finally deviated from the prescribed discussion points and asked people in our group what was working for them. Then the discussion took off like a rocket and I found out about all kinds of cool things: neighborhood cooperative chicken flocks, the growth in communal community gardens in Port Townsend (up from three to 25 in one year in a community of about 8,000), an eat local week program focused on a 100-mile diet in public schools, the part of the USDA’s SNAP that allows for purchasing of food plants (something new to many at the workshop including me, although it has been part of the program since 1973), a local theme garden with plants labeled in Latin (a Roman theme), a marketing co-op for urban farmers (Urban Abundance), rotating free tastings by vendors at a local farmers’ market, a food & market calendar created through a collaborative effort from many local health and food organizations and businesses, using faith-based and other community organizations to publicize information on local food, and so on.

Overall, the conference was great. I'm really glad I went.

At the Food Policy Conference: Neighborhood to Nation in Portland

I'm in Portland, Oregon, attending the Neighborhood to Nation Food Policy Conference, sponsored by the Community Food Security Coalition. A few Alaskans are here: Bob Mikol (TA for Craig Gerlach's Comparative Farming and Sustainable Food Systems class, among other things), Danny Consenstein (Alaska Farm Service Agency), Alli Harvey (with the Alaska Center for the Environment's Local Food project), Diane Peck (Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, Obesity Prevention and Chronic Disease Prevention), Rachel Garcia (intern with the Alaska Community Agriculture Association), Eleanor Wirts (UAF RAP grad student and musher), Johanna Herron (Alaska Farm to School), Mark Carper (UAA and the Alaska Food Policy Council), Kelsey Bearden (fellow student from Comparative Farming), Lisa Sadler-Hart (Sitka Local Foods Network), and myself (UAF School of Natural Resources & Agricultural Sciences, Ester Republic reporter and publisher, librarian, gardener, AK Food Policy Council member, Ester Community Association member, et cetera). I'm down here in large measure because of Gerlach, SNRAS dean Carol Lewis, and Diane Peck. There were others from Alaska, too (Danielle Giles, Nikos Pastos, and Ryan Zinn, but I didn't meet them--Zinn was a presenter, from the Fair World Project).

And I'm having a blast. This is a great group of people, a good 640 strong, from 46 states and DC, plus Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec. I attended a short course (Food Policy Advocacy 101) this morning and the plenary gathering this afternoon. The plenary speakers were great, talking about poverty, food deserts, exploited food service and other food industry workers (did you know that the federal minimum wage is only $2.13 an hour? ridiculous!), community gardens, community organizing. Talk about inspiring people.

After the plenary session, we broke out into networking groups, and Eleanor and I went with the Canadians while the rest of the Alaskans networked with the Northwest region. THAT was interesting. We told them we were crashing their party, and they accepted us with good grace and not a few jokes ("I can see Alaska from my house!"). The stereotype of the polite Canadian was not actually blown, despite a not-very-serious attempt to dispel it ("Fuck off!" from one speaker and apparently frequent Facebook poster (not sure if this was a joke, actually) at an opportune and humorous moment of self-teasing about being all polite--I guess you had to be there, but the whole group laughed). There was much emphasis on relationships between people, talking about developing mutual trust and respect between food producers and others in the food system. I was struck by the quiet, polite, and respectful discourse, along with the deep level of political savvy and pronounced opinon concerning the recent majority government positioning of Steven Harper and his party in the Canadian federal government. Very different in approach and delivery than US types, but lots of zing and pow (quite politely phrased, though)!

I've met a lot of fascinating people with great projects and amazing accomplishments. One man, Raymond Figueroa, from New York City, is working with a community gardening project (Friends of Brook Park) taking on abandoned spaces and turning them into a way to give locals control over their food and a way to make a difference in their own lives, to bring dignity back.

Organic agriculture typology

For my Comparative Farming and Sustainable Food Systems class, we were given an assignment in which we were to either a) examine USDA organic certification, or b) create a typology of organic agriculture. I chose the latter.

Organic agriculture comes in many stripes and emphases. There's agroecological farming, agroforestry and forest gardening (slightly different), biodynamics, permaculture, certified organic (several countries and international certifications), Natural Farming, Nayakrishi, wildculturing. Some of these don't have to be strictly organic (that "strictly" really being a broad range). So, what is organic agriculture, exactly? Here's the Wikipedia definition, which basically captures it:

Organic farming is the form of agriculture that relies on techniques such as crop rotation, green manure, compost and biological pest control to maintain soil productivity and control pests on a farm. Organic farming excludes or strictly limits the use of manufactured fertilizers, pesticides (which include herbicides, insecticides and fungicides), plant growth regulators such as hormones, livestock antibiotics, food additives, and genetically modified organisms.

Wikipedia also quotes the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, which goes further than the techniques and technologies required or limited by organic agriculture, to include the human element:

Organic agriculture is a production system that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people. It relies on ecological processes, biodiversity and cycles adapted to local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects. Organic agriculture combines tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared environment and promote fair relationships and a good quality of life for all involved.

The thing that is nice about this second definition is that it gets to one aspect of organic agriculture that is very important in many of its genres: the ethics of growing organic.

The essential point is that not all organic farming is the same; not all farmers who grow organic use the same methods. Organic agriculture can vary by quite a bit; for example, organic agriculture is not necessarily sustainable agriculture. Organic agriculture need not necessarily integrate crop and livestock production; some organic farmers do one or the other but not both.

Agroecology, or the science and application of ecological principles to the production of food, fuel, fiber, and pharmaceuticals, is not exactly a type of organic agriculture. Wikipedia describes several different approaches: ecosystems agroecology, agronomic ecology, ecological political economy, agro-population ecology, integrated assessment of multifunctional agricultural systems (the landscape and agriculture as part of a wider, integrated set of social institutions), and holon agroecology (an apparently huge topic in itself, the ecology of contexts).

According to the Agroecology Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agroecology is, among other things, "beneficent agriculture.'

The University of California-Berkeley calls it "a scientific discipline that uses ecological theory to study, design, manage and evaluate agricultural systems that are productive but also resource conserving." This is essentially the same description given by UC Santa Cruz' Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.

ATTRA has a bunch of information on USDA certified organic and what that all means, with pages on livestock, pests, crops, regulation & history, marketing, fertilizer and soils. Farm Direct has a bunch of US links on organic farming; Organic-World.net has tons of info by country, statistics of all sorts, and news. And the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations also has a bunch of information on organic agriculture. The FAO describes organic agriculture as:

a holistic production management system that avoids use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified organisms, minimizes pollution of air, soil and water, and optimizes the health and productivity of interdependent communities of plants, animals and people. The non-use of external agriculture inputs which results in natural resources degradation (e.g. soil nutrient mining) does not qualify as "organic". On the other hand, farming systems which do not use external inputs but actively follow organic agriculture principles of health and care are considered organic, even if the agro-ecosystem is not certified organic.

An article in CounterPunch by Heather Gray and K. Rashid Nuri called "How Organic Agriculture Can Feed the World" talks about this, and the persistent idea that currently exists—but is changing—that "Green Revolution," industrial techniques (and attitudes, although that's usually unspoken) in agriculture are all that can stave off mass starvation. The Worldwatch Institute also discusses these stereotypes of industrial vs. organic agriculture, in an article titled "Can Organic Farming Feed Us All?" These articles touch on both technique and attitudes, but not so much on what David Korten calls the Great Turning, or a philosophical, spiritual, and cultural revolution in attitude that he (and others) believe is essential for survival.

Sustainable Table has a nice distinction between sustainable and organic agriculture:

Organic farming generally falls within the accepted definition of sustainable agriculture. However, it is important to distinguish between the two, since organic products can be (unsustainably) produced on large industrial farms, and farms that are not certified organic can produce food using methods that will sustain the farm's productivity for generations. Some organic dairy farms, for example, raise cows in large confinement facilities but are able to meet the bare minimum requirements for organic certification, while a non-organic certified small farm could use organic guidelines and be self-sufficient by recycling all the farm's waste to meet its fertility needs.

What intrigues me most, however, are the organic farming systems that focus on sustainability, ethics, and fundamental shifts in world view.

Here's a few of them:

Biodynamics

I've written about this type of agriculture elsewhere. It's sort of the Gaia approach: in biodynamics, the farm is treated as a single, unified organism. Wikipedia again proves a good source for succinctly describing what differentiates this type of agriculture from other organic approaches:

Regarded by some as the first modern ecological farming system and one of the most sustainable, biodynamic farming has much in common with other organic approaches, such as emphasizing the use of manures and composts and excluding of the use of artificial chemicals on soil and plants. Methods unique to the biodynamic approach include the use of fermented herbal and mineral preparations as compost additives and field sprays and the use of an astronomical sowing and planting calendar. Biodynamics originated out of the work of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy.

The local example of a biodynamic farm is Wild Rose Farm, owned by Eric Mayo and Susan Kerndt. My comment to Eric about it was that it seemed like a method of staying in touch with the Earth and its rhythms. Of particular note to me is the use of astronomical conditions, such as phases of the moon or planetary or stellar positions as guides to timing of planting, etc. One must be aware of the world and the skies to plant or harvest on such a schedule. ATTRA has a detailed description of the method on its website, and of course the Demeter Association, which certifies biodynamic farms through its various national chapters, does also.

Permaculture

According to the Permaculture Institute, this is more than an agricultural method:

Permaculture is an ecological design system for sustainability in all aspects of human endeavor. It teaches us how build natural homes, grow our own food, restore diminished landscapes and ecosystems, catch rainwater, build communities and much more.

Permaculture is a portmanteau word, originating from permanent agriculture/culture. It takes an agroecological approach to food. An interesting feature of permaculture is the design element: the design of a system is approached both from a methodological and a structural viewpoint.

Methodology: The method used to design a permaculture system involves the following aspects in sequence: observation, boundaries, resources, evaluation, design, implementation and maintenance. Site observation, often for a full year, allows the designer to consider the seasonal changes and existing interrelationships of a given site as well as its physical characteristics. Boundaries include both physical limits and social ones. Resources include human and cultural ones (money, for example) as well as natural ones. Evaluation of these allows for preparation for the design, implementaion, and maintenance of the (in this case) agricultural system.

Structure: The patterns of the physical elements of a permaculture system echo naturally occuring ones. For example, I have two herb beds in my back yard which, I discovered in researching this article, reflect principles of permaculture design. The beds are in the shape of spirals, with a high peak in the center of the roughly circular bed that slopes downward in a spiral form, resulting in a single, roughly round bed with small microclimates: high and dry to lower, cooler, and damper soil. Different herbs grow better in different spots along this spiral structure, according to whether they prefer warmer or cooler soil, quicker drainage or slower-draining, shadier spots. Permaculture's physical structure is also viewed in terms of layers, as in a forest: the canopy, low tree layer, shrub layer, herbaceous plant layer, rhizosphere (root crops), the soil surface (cover crops), the vertical layer (climbing plants that grow through the various other layers), and the mycosphere or subsurface/surface layer of fungi.

Another element of permaculture is both structural and methodological: zones of intensity of human involvement and/or manipulation. These range from zone 0, the most intimately involved with human beings (our homes) to zone 5, utter wilderness, or no human intervention. Interestingly, this seems to exclude humanity as part of the system—as though we cannot be part of wilderness (zones 00, the human self, and 6, the wider world, are included in some reckonings of permaculture).

ATTRA also has a thorough description of permaculture, and calls it "unique among alternative farming systems (e.g., organic, sustainable, eco-agriculture, biodynamic) in that it works with a set of ethics that suggest we think and act responsibly in relation to each other and the earth." It describes these ethical principles as including a life ethic that recognizes the intrinsic worth of every living thing, and calls for care of the earth, caring for people, and setting limits to population growth and consumption. I disagree that permaculture is unique in this aspect; other farming systems also have an explicit ethical component.

Alaska has a few permaculture groups and blogs: Alaska Permaculture Community, the Alaska Permaculture Guild, and the Alaskan Eco Escape Educational Center (see also the Facebook page).

Nature or Natural Farming

This is the shizen nōhō that professor Gerlach refers to in the syllabus for the class. Also known as do-nothing farming, from the permaculturist's point of view, it is a type of permaculture. Developed by Masanobu Fukuoka and Mokichi Okada, it uses five guiding principles (as described on Wikipedia):

• human cultivation of soil, plowing or tilling are unnecessary, as is the use of powered machines
• prepared fertilizers are unnecessary, as is the process of preparing compost
• weeding, either by cultivation or by herbicides, is unnecessary
• applications of pesticides or herbicides are unnecessary
• pruning of fruit trees is unnecessary

Fukuoka popularized shizen nōhō in his book, The One-Straw Revolution, translated into English with the help of his disciple, Larry Korn.

Nayakrishi Andolon

Nayakrishi Andolon translates as New Agriculture Movement, and according to Wikipedia "is an agricultural movement in Bangladesh that opposes the use of Western pesticides and genetically altered seeds." It is a philosophy of agriculture that sees human beings as an intrinsic part of the natural world. It is about happiness:

[Nayakrishi Andolon] is the movement of the farming communities to cultivate happy relations of life and environment and new ways to build up communities. It is a way to creatively relate with Nature or "Praliriti" as is called in bangla language.

But Nayakrishi does not assume Nature or "Praliriti" as an external object outside the living human beings, or do not believe that a sharp margin can be drawn between human beings and external world without falling into illusions and contradictions. We are all Nature as well, and Nature or "Praliriti" exists through us.

The organization UBINIG has more information on the approach.

In bangla the word krishi, means the act of cultivation, but not in the conventional sense as we understand cultivation now, which is as an act to produce consumer needs for the human beings using earth as merely means of production. The word 'krishi is rather cultivation of the relation between human beings and nature that transforms both and functions as an integral whole, as the single organism. In this relation human beings are not the supreme agent possessing, commanding and controlling the object of production, i.e.,nature. The nature also transforms the human beings. It is an act of reciprocal nurturing. There is no outside and inside of human existence, since we are both thinking beings and nature.
…
Andolon is movement -- movement at various levels: cultural, mobilisational, political and organisational. It is also a movement at the site of ideology, discourse and power. At the margins of imagination and determination Nayakrishi is also about promise of future. But most importantly Nayakrishi Andolon is the movement to change our destructive lifestyles, it is a lifestyle movement that is proper for human beings endowed with the capacity to act politically and spiritually against the destruction of conditions of life and livelihood. Nayakrishi is a movement to move from drstructive and preadatory stage of civilisation to creative and joyful lifestyles.

This is a level of ethics that moves into spirituality and an entire way of life, a long remove from the USDA National Organic Program certification of a technique applied on one part of a given farm.

Cross-posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Previous posts in this series:

Farms, schools, soil, and dirt
Seven industrial agriculture myths
Farming systems and Food, Inc.
Financial finagling in food and sustainability
Food systems, policy, and foodsheds
Food systems and shizen
Sustainable food systems class

Midterm madness: agriculture and libraries and cats

I focused my recent editorial on agriculture, which fits right in with my life the last couple of years: gardening and garden expansion, the Alaska Food Policy Council (which I got involved with via my job at SNRAS), the Alaska Community Agriculture Association (ditto), the Sustainable Agriculture Conference, and most recently, my class with Craig Gerlach on sustainable food systems and farming. It's a giant editorial, three pages. But the midterm is going to be a monster, probably around 24 to 36 pages. It's grueling, and I don't know if I'm going to be able to get it done in time!

And then there's the new kittens, who are wildly energetic, and the grantwriting workshop that Susan Willsrud and I are doing for the Ester library, and the new plans for it, and who knows what all.

Right now, my life is so frantically busy I can't keep up with myself.

Farms, schools, soil, and dirt

As the Comparative Farming & Sustainable Food Systems course has progressed, I have, predictably, gotten farther and farther behind in my reading. In part, this is due to the continuing snowstorm of papers, theses, articles, poems, essays, and miscellaneous book recommendations we keep getting from our professor, Craig Gerlach, and his teaching assistant, Bob Mikol (not to mention the occasional suggested piece from various students in the class). There is just no way to keep up. I'm keeping a couple of binders and printing out the various publications I get from them, and I keep finding new and interesting titles to purchase at Gulliver's. These include:

The Taste for Civilization: The Connection Between Food, Politics, and Civil Society, by Janet A. Flammang, and The End of Food, by Paul Roberts

Likewise, I've not been able to keep up with blogging on the class. Johanna Harron came in to talk to us about the Farm-to-School program set up by the state of Alaska (she's the program's only employee so far). The program covers school nutrition, local food systems, and education around food. Nancy Tarnai did an interview with her about her thesis project and about the program.

Last week, Mike Emers of Rosie Creek Farm taught the class, concentrating on soil, dirt, and some farming how-to. So far it has been very interesting. He told us about the phrase "organic farming," apparently coined by one Lord Northborne in 1940 in his book Look to the Land. Mike also told us about Rudolf Steiner, the father of biodynamic agriculture, or the view that a farm as a whole should or can be seen as an organism.

One thing Mike said sticks in my mind: "Farming is a manipulative process." It's all about managing sunlight, water, and soil, he said (and plants and animals, of course). Maintaining economic and ecologic sustainability is a matter of minimizing off-farm inputs to sustain the farm in perpetuity. That requires a lot of work, a lot of manipulation of the systems on the farm. He offered a list of useful books, bringing in well-worn and frankly battered copies of each of them:

• The New Organic Grower, by Eliot Coleman
• Organic Vegetable Production
  
• Building Soils for Better Crops, by Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es
  
• The Soul of Soil, by Grace Gershuny and Joe Smillie
• Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America, by Steven Stoll
  
• Sustainable Vegetable Production from Start-Up to Market (dated but still great, Mike said)

He also recommended an article by William S. Cooter, "Ecological Dimensions of Medieval Agrarian Systems," published in Agricultural History.

Mike mostly concentrated on soil. He described four basic elements of soil that are important to the farmer: structure, soil organic matter (the key to how most organic farmers manage the soil), biology, and nutrients (including water). There was quite a bit of interesting info in this discussion, which explained a few things that I'd never quite understood, although I've been working with soil scientists here at SNRAS for a good decade and had seen some of the terms. Plants, Mike said, decompose into very small, complex particles that have negative charges, which attract cations of the nutrients plants need and hold onto water. The cation exchange capacity of soil is its ability to exchange positive ions of nutrients between organic matter and plant root hairs. Good tilth exists when there is good soil structure and high soil organic matter. Humus is compost broken down further into soil organic matter, very tiny pieces that are useable by plants. Most farms in the country, Mike explained, have very low SOM, about one half of one percent, because of erosion, soil compaction from heavy machinery, chemical contamination due to salt buildup from chemical fertilizers, and poor tilling practices that destroy soil structure.

The problem of poor tillage was broached in the movie The Plow That Broke the Plains. The culprits in poor tillage are (aside from a farmer's failure to understand the value of good soil structure) excessive use of the moldboard plow, the disc harrow, and the rototiller. Good soil has clods (little ones) that hold moisture and nutrients. Too much tilling breaks up these clods, and accelerates microbial action which then releases carbon and breaks down the soil organic matter. Rototilling, in fact, can turn your soil into powdery dust. Overtillage did just that (combined with drought years) during the Dust Bowl.

Mike described machinery that has been invented that doesn't destroy the soil structure, or at least not as much: the chisel plow, the articulating spader, and a couple of other gizmos. Mike liked a company owned by a pair of inventor brothers, I think this company in Pennsylvania.

We then went on to talk about green manure, fallowing, and cover crops, no-till methods which seem to require either herbicides or crushing implements to keep the off-season greeneries from becoming weeds later on. No-tillage farming results in more perennial weeds and it cools the soil---not an advantage in the north.

More later!

Cross-posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Previous posts in this series:

Seven industrial agriculture myths

Farming systems and Food, Inc.

Financial finagling in food and sustainability
Food systems, policy, and foodsheds
Food systems and shizen
Sustainable food systems class

Seven industrial agriculture myths

Phil Loring started writing articles on this theme for me in the Republic, but he hasn't finished the series yet. Now I find myself studying this same topic in my Comparative Farming and Sustainable Food Systems class. The myths are those described in Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. They include:

1) Industrial agriculture will feed the world.
2) Industrial food is safe, healthy, and nutritious.
3) Industrial food is cheap.
4) Industrial agriculture is efficient.
5) Industrial agriculture offers more food choices to consumers.
6) Industrial agriculture benefits the environment and wildlife.
7) Biotechnology will solve all the problems of industrial agriculture.

The section on these myths in Fatal Harvest has been reprinted on Alternet; I've linked to them above, but here's the short rebuttal:

• Myth number one is a classic case of misdirection: it implies (as typically presented) that somehow the problem of hunger is one of a failure to produce enough food, and the answer is that industrial agriculture is the only means whereby we can produce sufficient food to feed all 7 billion of us (or the anticipated 9 billion by 2050). Actually, people go hungry because of politics, economic shenanigans, poverty, and landlessness. Industrial agriculture actually increases the incidence of hunger by raising the cost of farming (by a huge factor), by forcing farmers off their land, by focusing on high-profit export crops rather than food crops for local consumption. The World Bank and other international financial institutions have promoted policies that have supported industrial export agriculture, for example, and have caused hunger through free-market and globalization policies.

• Myth number two was thoroughly debunked for me by Food, Inc., although the movie didn't go into why this folderol is accepted. Part of the reason, as pointed out by the authors of Fatal Harvest, is that industrial food is very very consistent: it looks clean and wholesome. But looks can be deceiving: from the poisonous chemicals it's grown and treated with (as pointed out by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring) to the concentrated, empty junk of modern processed food (as described in Super Size Me by Morgan Spurlock, and many other authors since), industrial food is really, really bad for you.

• Myth number three is something you can believe only if you ignore the staggering health, environmental, and human costs of industrial agriculture—a technique commonly known as "externalizing costs," and an everyday part of our modern economic thinking. It is, of course, insane to think that actual costs (not those that are mere ticks or sheafs of the paper/exchange medium) can simply be shunted aside and not counted. They show up, somewhere. It is monumentally selfish and dangerous to all of us for a few business owners to shove those costs upon us for their short-term gain. Industrial agriculture is very, very expensive, and that pleasantly consistent-looking food costs us a bundle, even if we don't pay it at the cash register. We pay for it at the doctor's, in the price of gas, in our taxes, in the length (or shortness) of our lives, in the moral cost of cruelty to animals and extinction of species and varieties, in the human cost of culture destruction, etc. Farming the old-fashioned way is a labor-intensive business, and industrial agriculture, being far more mechanized, thrust a whole lot of people out of work.

• Myth number four is partly a product of myth number three: industrial agriculture looks efficient if you don't have to count all the costs (such as destroyed, contaminated, eroded, lost topsoil, for example), and if you don't count the fact that agriculture is supposed to produce food, rather than a commodity. Industrial agriculture is very good at producing huge amounts of commodities on large amounts of land. It isn't very good at producing a lot of food per acre, though. Gardens, and small, diversified farms, are much more productive per acre. Even Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations simply outsource their land and other input needs to external sources. It really isn't a very efficient or good use of resources. (See this PDF report by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.)

• Steve Hannaford, in his book Market Domination! the impact of industry consolidation on competition, innovation, and consumer choice, thoroughly explores the phenomenon of pseudo-variety, and exploded myth number five in an article he wrote for the Republic about the problem, using beer as an example. Minor variations in content and major variations in packaging do not food differences make. Another particular problem is the disappearance of heirloom varieties of food plants. Food that can handle the conditions or requirements imposed by the industrial food system (such as long shipping distances, rough handling, uniformity of appearance and flavor, resistance to pesticides, fast growth, precisely timed harvest, etc.) loses the myriad choices that varieties adapted to a wide range of needs and microclimates offer. All those small, comparatively skinny chickens, for example, that lay small but tasty eggs and have small breasts and grow sort of slowly, but have a penchant for insect pests and chickweed. Soft-skinned tomatoes that bloom and ripen throughout the summer and have peculiar shapes and interesting stripes and spots. And so on. This variation is not adapted for industrial conditions, and so isn't sought. As smaller, diversified farms are forced out of business through land acquisition, fewer crops are grown, and more of only a few varieties. This has lead to disaster in the past and very likely will again if we keep to our present myopic course.

• Myth number six is a mix of chutzpah and nonsense. I was boggled when I heard this particular one, but a major part of this claim is that industrial agriculture is supposed to be more productive per acre than other forms of agriculture (such as organic or sustainable agriculture). I looked into this, however (some months ago, actually, before I took the class), and industrial agriculture is NOT more productive. Gardening and diversified farming are, in fact, far more productive of food. According to a new study by Jules Pretty, et al. in Environmental Science and Technology, "crop yields on farms in developing countries that used sustainable agriculture rose nearly 80% in four years." That alone doesn't refute the idea that industrial agriculture is more productive. An excellent and well-sourced article in Grist magazine reveals the truth: industrial agriculture requires massive inputs that degrade agricultural, environmental, and human systems in order to get high productivity for a limited number of foods. Industrial agriculture is comparatively sterile, and uses resources up, rather than building them up. It most decidedly does NOT benefit the environment.

• Myth number seven, that biotechnology will be, essentially, a panacea, really depends on how it is used and if its use doesn't simply cause more problems than it solves. Biotechnology as applied to food is typically used to a) patent varieties, b) create pesticide, herbicide, or disease resistance, c) create greater productivity in crops, or d) create genetic and cosmetic uniformity and/or predictability (in other words, to reduce biodiversity). Sometimes it adds nutritional value (as in "golden rice"). It creates industrial foods, crops or varieties that are adapted to industrial needs. The Biotechnology Industry Organization, or BIO, has a Frequently Asked Questions page on agricultural biotechnology that provides quite the interesting contrast to the concerns I keep finding about biotech crops. While BIO answers concerns in a very even-handed tone, it does not address the basic assumptions about how agriculture should be conducted, and the philosophic underpinnings that differentiate agroecological principles from industrial ones. The site reiterates some of the basic assumptions about what the problems of agriculture are (such as, people are hungry because not enough food is grown, and biotech will help grow more food), rather than looking honestly at the results of our current agricultural system (such as inequitable distribution of food, hunger caused by poverty, farmers unable to grow food because they've been forced off their land by economic or political causes) and asking if they are really what we want or need—and then determining if biotechnology can address those needs. Another site, AgBioWorld, is even less connected to what the issues are, and is a good example of completely missing the point. This site does a lot of answering the more emotion-laden worries, the pig-in-a-poke or straw man arguments, rather than providing answers to genuine, fact-based concerns. Skipping through a plethora of articles and scholarly pieces on biotech, I did find one that talks about the issue of patent law and policy and their effect on how well (or if) biotechnology is used to benefit, say, poor small-scale farmers. It's an 87-page PDF, but talks about the unintended consequences of US patent law and policy on, among other things, researchers "applying biotechnology to the solution of developing-country food security problems."

In a blog post I found on www.brighthub.com, a few more "advantages" were listed:

• longer food shelf-life or availability (also known as the Twinkie phenomenon or the winter tomato)
• less constraint in number of croppings per year (again, not counting the true cost of using up the soil, water, etc.)
• greater availability of human labor (read: more unemployment)
• faster time to market (and what does it mean if the market is halfway around the world as opposed to down the road?)

Sustainable Table has a long list of concerns that deal in large measure with profound
philosophical and quality of life issues that are only partly addressed by the agricultural industry. It seems almost that holders of these two viewpoints are talking past each other rather than to each other.

Cross-posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Earlier posts in this series:

Farming systems and Food, Inc.

Financial finagling in food and sustainability
Food systems, policy, and foodsheds
Food systems and shizen
Sustainable food systems class

Farming systems and Food, Inc.

Week four of the food systems course has again been chock-full of readings, ideas, and a movie: Food Inc.. I've heard about the film, which came out in 2008, but I'd never seen it. It's put me off feedlot anything: pork, poultry, beef. Yick.

I took notes during the film, which we watched on Feb. 8. The movie concentrates on food safety (or lack thereof) and the sort of indentured servitude in which farmers and factory workers are trapped in the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, CAFOs, or factory farms/industrial farms that are where, horrifically, most of our meat is raised. It also goes into the influence of fast food and supermarket chains (in particular, MacDonald's and Wal-Mart) on the way meat is produced–their incredible purchasing power makes a big difference.

Here's a few items I jotted down:

• In the chicken ranches of the south, debt by the large-scale chicken meat sellers like Perdue or Tyson is deftly put onto the farmers, who (a) don't own the chickens (b) but must raise them to the specifications and requirements of the meat company and have no control over how their business is run. The farmer, who earns maybe $18,000 a year, ends up in major debt (in the realm of $100,000 to a half-million) because each chicken house costs a huge amount and the equipment, feed, and antibiotics (a necessary part of the operation) are also expensive--but the price the farmer gets for the meat is pretty much dictated by the company.
• The movie described the way the hog industry had dramatically changed, following the pattern in the poultry and beef industries.
• It went into the tactics of companies for dealing with regulation: infiltration of the agencies responsible for oversight by former lobbyists and former or future employees of the industries they are supposed to regulate, the reduction of funding for agencies, and the demonizing of government regulation and promotion of "personal responsibility" and "self-policing." The most interesting former employee (of Monsanto) was Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who worked as a lawyer for the company and later wrote the Supreme Court majority opinion that allowed Monsanto to prosecute farmers for seed patent infringement when their crops had been contaminated by Monsanto's Roundup-Ready GMO crops (the farmers have to prove they didn't steal it). Thomas didn't recuse himself, obviously. (He didn't recuse himself in the Roundup-Ready alfalfa case, either.)
• The film spent quite some time on the case of Moe Parr, who ran a seed-cleaning company and was being sued by Monsanto for, essentially, assisting in theft. He was driven out of business, eventually. (Monsanto has a reply to Food Inc. here.)
• The movie talked about Kevin's Law, that was introduced in response to the death of a little boy, Kevin, from a hamburger contaminated with a virulent strain of E. coli bacteria. Kevin's Law, simply put, would give the USDA the power to shut down meat packing plants that have too many health infringements, among other things. And guess what? it keeps dying in committee, even though it gets introduced every year since 2005. The ironic thing was that I had thought that it had been passed, and that we had protection like this already. The interviews with his mother were both very interesting and moving--not schmaltzy, even though it dealt with the very personal loss of her son. She and her mother have gone on to be very active politically for foodborne illness research and prevention.
• Another interesting aspect of the tactics used in the meat-packing industry was the undermining of unions, the hiring of illegal or new immigrants (but it's the immigrants who get hauled off to jail, not the managers or officers of the companies), and effect of NAFTA in driving Mexican farmers out of work and off their land because of cheap, subsidized corn from the US. The film made mention of Upton Sinclair's 1906 book, The Jungle, and how this led to the meatpacking industry's strength for many years as one of the safest, best-paid, and generally good industries in which to work in the US due to union effort and the public's appalled reaction to the horrors Sinclair described. Now, however, the meatpacking industry is back to being unsafe, and has lost much of the gains made during the middle of the 20th century.
• In one of the funnier ironic moments of the movie, an engineer and efficiency designer for one of the companies involved in the meat processing industry was glowingly describing their control room, where they could monitor and adjust the speed and activities of the machinery moving and treating meat in plants across the country. He said, with obvious pride, that it was "a marriage between technology and industry"--but apparently, I observed, not a marriage with agriculture.
• A stomach-turning moment for me came when they showed how a percentage of ammonia-treated beef is mixed into hamburger as a means of sterilizing the meat so that harmful pathogens don't survive. Again, a prideful manager spoke about how the percentage of meat in the industry that had this stuff in it should be up to 80% by 2010. I wondered about the effects of that ammonia on me when I eat the burger. I'm afraid I'm not buying hamburger any more unless I know this crud isn't in it.

In contrast to the industrialized food system, the movie interviewed Joel Salatin, an author and farmer and a wonderfully outspoken, biting, funny man. There were several good bits in the interview, but his point that growth in market share is not an end in itself was important. He doesn't want to get big—he'd no longer be farming.

And that, I think, was the essential point of the movie: that the consolidation and overmechanization of food/agriculture operations had made them into an industry, a means of making money—and they really have nothing to do with actual food or human beings anymore, resulting in an industry that isn't safe, isn't producing food, subsidizes disease, and has no connection to the land, plants, people, and animals it is supposedly about.

Previous posts in this series:

Financial finagling in food and sustainability
Food systems, policy, and foodsheds
Food systems and shizen
Sustainable food systems class

Cross posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Financial finagling in food and sustainability

Week three of the Comparative Farming and Sustainable Food Systems class proceeded on in fascinating detail. We've been talking about sustainability and the design of food and farm systems. Sustainability can be thought of as the interactions of cultural, economic, social, institutional, and energy components in a system that have positive effects on the present, without compromising the future. The design of such a system has an end of healthy ecosystems and healthy communities, creating wellbeing for people and their environment in both the short and long term. Cultural are distinguished from social components in that the former have to do with identity (traditions, value systems, language), while the latter have to do institutions and systems of organization (political structure, systems of control and distribution).

One of the topics that came up during the course of discussion was the food price spikes we're seeing lately and the resultant riots around the world. The professor handed out an article on this from the January 15 New Zealand Herald:

The food riots began in Algeria more than a week ago, and they are going to spread. During the last global food shortage, in 2008, there was serious rioting in Mexico, Indonesia and Egypt. We may expect to see that again, only more widespread.

The article talks about poverty, climate change, world population, global consumption patterns, floods, drought, imports, local crop failures. Interestingly, it does not talk about commodity speculation in grains and other foodstuffs. I recalled a story written for Harper's Magazine by Frederick Kaufman about the food riots of 2008 and what led up to them: he specifically focused on the role of companies like Goldman Sachs and the issue of commodities futures in wheat and corn in the food crisis. The title says it succinctly: "The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it." (PDF)

Investors were delighted to see the value of their venture increase, but the rising price of breakfast, lunch, and dinner did not align with the interests of those of us who eat.

I did a little searching on the web and found the letter from Steve Strongin on behalf of Goldman Sachs in response to the article, Kaufman's reply to that, and an interview with Kaufman by Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now!

The economics of sustainability has to do with full costing: what's known as the triple bottom line or the related integrated bottom line. We talked about economy of scale (Mike Emers of Rosie Creek Farm is helping to teach the class, and he spoke about this): maximizing your inputs (money, equipment, time, labor, etc.) for the most efficient and best levels of use for what you have—a balancing of costs and benefits. Each size of operation has an economy of scale that best suits it. Craig Gerlach brought up "neighboring," a term I hadn't heard before. This is a practice where neighbor farmers will work in common to help each other. For example, community harvesting: farmers in a particular local showing up at one farm to help harvest that farmer's fields, then moving on to the next farm in a given area, and so on, until all of their fields are harvested. Bringing in the harvest is an old tradition, as is barn-raising. Farmers may also share equipment.

in a food system, how do the local, regional, and global food systems link and interact? How do the scales of agriculture affect diversity in ecology, society, culture? We talked about the size of a farm affecting its ecological diversity: monoculture tends to be the rule on the extremely large farm. Gerlach hastened to point out that the modern industrial standard of monoculture and resource exploitation could be replaced with a restorative system, using organic and rotational methods, on the very large as well as the small farm, and that diversification of crops can be done over time as well as land area.

"Nature is the model."

This led us to talking about the plains vs. the prairie, and the idea of place-based development of breeds and farming methods. Gerlach mentioned the work of Wes Jackson, who became concerned about erosion of topsoil in the US (famously in the Dust Bowl of the thirties, but still continuing), and ended up founding an organization called The Land Institute. Most grains we use are annuals; we till the land, sow the seed, harvest the crop, and then plow under the stubble. The institute describes the situation and their mission this way:

No method for perpetuating agricultural productivity exists. Our goal is to improve the security of our food and fiber source by reducing soil erosion, decreasing dependency upon petroleum and natural gas, and relieving the agriculture-related chemical contamination of our land and water. Our specific research is an innovation for agriculture, using "nature as the measure" to develop mixed perennial grain crops as food for humans where farmers use nature as a standard or measure in making their agronomic decisions. Over 75 percent of human calories worldwide come from grains such as wheat and corn, but the production of these grains erodes ecological capital. Our research is directed toward the goal of having conservation as a consequence of agricultural production.

The classic documentary, The Plow that Broke the Plains, brought the problem of tilling and erosion to public attention in 1936. The sound is pretty bad on this, but it's an interesting piece.



"A healthy, well-integrated community needs to be integrated with its food," said Gerlach, and I agree. That means the consequences of agricultural economics has to be connected to the consequences of agriculture. Food, economics, human happiness: you can't rip off one sector without hurting the others.

Previous posts in this series:

Food systems, policy, and foodsheds
Food systems and shizen
Sustainable food systems class

Cross posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Food systems, policy, and foodsheds

The second week of my Comparative Food Systems class has readings in Anna Lappé's book, Diet for a Hot Planet, going over Hamm's seven principles for a healthy food system, reading an article by Jack Kloppenburg and others on the foodshed, an article on rural Alaska food systems by my professor, Craig Gerlach, and researching definitions of "food system." In the meantime, I've been working on the Alaska Food Policy Council's introductory paper on food policy and the Alaska food system, so these two projects dovetail quite nicely. It adds up to a lot of reading—interesting, definitely, but a lot of pages.

So, to start: Lappé makes the argument that not only is small-scale, diversified organic farming that caters to a local market sustainable and good for communities, this type of agriculture is climate-friendly because it: produces fewer comparative greenhouse gas emissions than industrial farming; requires less energy inputs from fossil fuels; improves the soil; and actually sequesters carbon in the soil rather than releasing it. Her description of the energy-intensiveness of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations is horrific—and never mind the inherent cruelty of them, she hasn't even gotten into that so far. She does talk about the unhealthiness of the modern diet in terms of the amount of processing food undergoes: highly processed foods, like Pringles or Pop-Tarts, use a huge amount of energy and resources—and they're just not that good for you.

Lappé describes seven principles of a climate-friendly diet:

1. Reach for real food (food that has fewer ingredients and isn't processed or transmogrified a lot is likelier to be less climate-destructive)
2. Put plants on your plate (eat less meat—most modern meat is grain-fed, which is energy-intensive; if you eat meat, eat meat that is raised humanely and sustainably, because these practices, like grass-fed beef, produce less greenhouse gas emissions—grain-fed cattle produce more methane than grass-fed cattle!)
3. Don't panic, go organic (industrial chemicals require large energy inputs; nitrogen fertilizer produced through the Haber-Bosch process, for example—and then there's all those petrochemicals used for pesticides)
4. Lean toward local (less shipping, for one)
5. Finish your peas…the ice caps are melting (food waste is a waste of energy resources; institutional composting makes use of food waste and reduces land-fill emissions)
6. Send packaging packing (the throwaway society wastes humongous amounts of resources; I think we should institute a law like that in Germany, where the producer or seller of packing must take it back from whoever they sell it to. For example, the customer buys a box of chocolate, but returns the box to the store—the store has to take the box, no charge. Then the store can return their collected boxes to the supplier of the chocolate—and the supplier can't charge them. The cost to the retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers has reduced extra packaging dramatically in Germany. Lappé has not mentioned this law so far in my reading.)
7. DIY food (grow and cook your own food: better for you and lots less processing—and therefore lots less energy intensive)

Hamm's article, assigned last week, was also interesting but a bit less easy reading than Lappé's book. (My editorial eye kept twitching—he'd have had red ink all over his paper had I gotten to it before publication.) His operating principles for a healthy food system are that it would:

1. insure community food security for all residents
2. be community based
3. be locally integrated
4. be reasonably seasonal in nature
5. present primarily opportunities rather than problems
6. connect health across the layers of the system
7. be diverse

This is, of course, not at all what our current food system looks like. Our current food system is highly energy-intensive, unseasonal, deters connectivity between the different layers of the food system, is almost completely disassociated with local communities, is rarely distributed or minimally distributed within a community, and is rife with pseudo-diversity and ultra-processed crud disguised as foodoid items.

You can tell where I'm coming from, can't you?

A concise definition of "food system" comes from the San Francisco Food Alliance's 2005 San Francisco Collaborative Food System Assessment (PDF), which says

A food system describes the cycle of growing, distributing, eating and recycling our food, and all the factors that affect it.

Short and sweet! It's "all the factors" that are the hairy part, however: natural resources and environmental systems, social and cultural systems, political systems, economic systems, technology, research, education, etc. That encompasses a lot of things: disease, hunger, political will, costs, food safety, commodities trading, water rights, the Green Revolution, agribusiness, organic certification, heirloom seeds, and so on. This in turn brings up ideas like food democracy and equity, food sovereignty, fair trade, self-reliance, guerilla gardening, etc.

Kloppenberg's article, "Coming in to the Foodshed," takes the metaphor of the watershed and applies it to food. How does food move through the landscape, the community? One quote from it struck me:

Provided with an apparent cornucopia of continuously available foods, few consumers have much knowledge of the biological, social, or technical parameters and implications of food production in the global village.

Of course, much of the power of agribusiness ultimately depends on farmers and consumers not knowing. If we do not know, we do not act. And even if we do know, the physical and social distancing characteristics of the global food system may constrain our willingness to act when the locus of the needed action is distant or when we have no real sense of connection to the land or those on whose behalf we ought to act. Ultimately, distancing disempowers. Control passes to those who can act and are accustomed to act at a distance: the Philip Morrises, Monsantos, and ConAgras of the world.

(My emphasis added.) In short, it pays the big guys for the public to be uniformed or misinformed.

The thing that I am discovering about an examination of food systems and sustainable farming: food is political, and food politics are radical—because the nexus of the issue is about self-determination, freedom.

Kloppenberg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson go on (and bear in mind that this article was published 15 years ago) to talk about "foodshed work." They describe it so (again, my emphasis):

• A foodshed will be embedded in a moral economy that envelopes [sic] and conditions market forces. The global food system now operates according to allegedly "natural" rules of efficiency, utility maximization, competitiveness, and calculated self-interest. The historical extension of market relations has deeply eroded the obligations of mutuality, reciprocity, and equity that ought to characterize all elements of human interaction. Food production today is organized largely with the objective of producing a profit rather than with the purpose of feeding people. But human society has been and should remain more than a marketplace.
• Community Supported Agriculture also serves as an illustration of our expectation that the moral economy of a foodshed will be shaped and expressed principally through communities.…We imagine foodsheds as commensal communities that encompass sustainable relationships both between people (those who eat together) and between people and the land (obtaining food without damage). …[B]uilding the commensal community means establishment or recovery of social linkages beyond atomistic market relationships through the production, exchange, processing, and consumption of food. …Finally, the standards of a commensal community require respect and affection for the land and for other species. It is through food that humanity's most intimate and essential connections to the earth and to other creatures are expressed and consummated.
• The dominant dynamics of the global food system actively erode both moral economy and community. We agree with those who believe that this destructiveness is an inherent property of the system, and that what is needed is fundamental transformation rather than simple reform.

All this makes having a garden at home look like a revolutionary act. And maybe it is.

More later on Gerlach's article, "Rural Alaskan Food Systems: Problems, Prospects, and Policy Considerations," written for the Alaska Food Policy Council in August 2010.

See my previous posts on this course:

• Food systems and shizen
• Sustainable food systems class

Cross posted at SNRAS Science & News.