A spike in viewership

Hmmm. Judging by the spike in the number of viewers on July 3rd, it looks like a lot of people were checking this page to see if and when Ester was going to hold its parade and picnic!

I have been very, very bad about writing here on a regular basis, folks. For one thing, it's summer.  My garden is EXPLODING. Every spare minute I have is spent outdoors trying to keep up with the weeds and create more potato beds. When I'm not there, then I am either a) washing the dirt off, b) relaxing at the Eagle (with smudges all over my face), c) at the library (either gardening or doing some sort of work), or d) at work on campus.

Right—and then occasionally I read a book. For a few pages.

The only reason I'm doing this right now (at 2:49 am) is because I fell into bed at 6 pm and woke up at 10:30 pm. And tomorrow's a work day!

Oh, but my review did get published: "Seeding a culture of remembering: a review of Saving More Than Seeds."

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)

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.

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.

Pink sauerkraut

We make sauerkraut every year, anywhere from two to six gallons' worth. Last year, we tried making it with some of the tougher, greener leaves from the outer portions of cabbages. It worked, but the sauerkraut was a little chewy. Still, it was flavorful and good. This year, using the lovely five-gallon ceramic crock that my parents gave us, we made another batch, but for the first time, we used purple cabbage as well as the regular pale green stuff. The result? Pink sauerkraut.

We decanted it last night, scooping off the bits of mold and bacterial colonies that had developed on the surface of the very salty water, scraping off the top bit of the sauerkraut just to be safe, and then Hans rinsed it and I stuffed it into a bunch of 12-ounce jars. Hans added water to some, red wine to others, and to a couple rice wine vinegar. Quite tasty. Photo to come.

I really love having food to put by for the winter from our garden.

Library, gazebo, garden

Library:

This last week I spent considerable time updating the John Trigg Ester Library website and the Friends of the Ester Library website. They both still look a bit funky to me, but they're serviceable, and there's a lot of good information on line now. The monthly board meeting is coming up tomorrow; these meetings have been running two hours, up from one hour or less when we first started meeting. There's been so much going on (fundraising, designwork, construction & work parties, nonprofit applications, etc.) that we end up not having enough time to get through evverything.

Matt Prouty has been working on the revision of the library plans to one storey, and should have them for us at tomorrow's board meeting, along with the new cost estimate. The site plan is the big thing needed, so that we can get on with our driveway-building and site-clearing. I haven't done any scything of the grass jungle in the drive this year because I figure that there will be massive dirtwork done soon. I'm hoping we can have a tree-felling extravaganza in the next two weeks.

Gazebo:

The gazebo is really part of the library project, but since it's a separate structure, and smaller, and almost done, I think of it separately. We'll probably have a work party or two, coming up July 24 and 31. This will be pretty cool, actually. We will be doing the following tasks:

• building benches
• cleaning up the woods
• making a two-sided 4x8-foot corkboard to put between two of the gazebo posts
• putting in the final ties on the ceiling
• taking out the center post
• putting the metal skirting on the posts

Hans and I planted the hanging baskets and four flowerpots at the gazebo this summer, and I've been going down there once a week or so to water them (most of the baskets are under the overhang of the gazebo roof--a couple will catch a little rain, but not enough). There's a bunch of wood scraps and leftover pieces from the roofing last year that need to get cleaned up, and plenty of corks and peeled logs. We'll need to buy some sealant or stain or something to help preserve the benches.

Garden:

The garden is beginning to explode. (Fortunately, I have a cookbook for just this type of emergency.) The potatoes are HUGE. I hope all that energy they're putting into leaves and stems is translating into lots of potatoes underground. I managed to give/sell the last of my extra tomatoes and corn yesterday, but I still have to get sufficient dirt to plant the rest of the tomatoes I have that still need transplanting into big buckets. Lots of little green tomatoes all over the yard. The beans (black coco bush) have finally started to flower, and the fava beans are blooming and making lots of pods. The brassicas keep wanting to bolt, though. (Cabbages are still holding out.)