Letter to the Editor: A is for Armed

March 6, 2014

To the Editor:

In the news is “Campus gun bill before committee.” There is nothing more important in the world for a student to get an A in their class. An armed student is in a much better position to negotiate with the teacher to get an A in class than an unarmed student. A student has to do whatever they have to do to get that A in class. Alaska needs their students to get as many As as possible and if that means arming students to get an A, well so be it.

John Suter 

Chugiak, Alaska

Book reviews

I am reviewing two books, and it is tough work.  Mostly it is tough because taking the time to thoroughly go through these books and give them a solid look is hard given all the other stuff I'm doing; they're very interesting works.

The first is by Catherine Phillips, Saving More Than Seeds: Practices and Politics of Seed Saving, for the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development .












The second is by a local author, Dan Osborne, Alaska's Tanana Valley Railroads. Both will go to the John Trigg Ester Library when I'm done reviewing them. JAFSCD gets my review of Phillips' book, but I'll post the review of Dan's book here.

The Penultimate Issue

Here she is at the LiBerry Music Festival, Carey Seward, musician and playwright, founder of Seward's Follies, on the cover of the penultimate issue of The Ester Republic. Or possibly the last issue, but what I put on the cover was the word "penultimate," thinking that perhaps I didn't mean it but too tired to look it up. Hah! My subconscious really didn't want to let it go.
At any rate, now I have that ambiguous possibility waiting for me, the hope left in print on the early October 2012 issue of Ester's only paper that it might in fact return, left there due to bleary eyes and a late night trying to get the last damn issue to bed and off to the printer, once again without enough of the right kind of help, despite the good intentions of so many good people.
And now, people still ask me from time to time if the Republic will ever return, or they tell me they miss it. I miss it too.

I think about what the next issue tagline could be:

• the Resurrection Issue (implies it'll go on living, if the Romans don't get it)
• the Zombie Issue (much more probable scenario, at least insofar as the condition of Madame Publisher is likely to be)
• the Revival Issue (I doubt I'll get Religion, but who knows?)
• the Reawakened Issue (it was asleep all along, just hibernating here in the north, folks)

See how much fun this could be?
However, the Republic won't be back until the library is built. I just can't handle two enormous projects at the same time. (No guarantees, folks!)

The Republic Rides Again!

Yup, the Publisher is Risen! and the Republic is slooowly hauling itself back to its feet and slogging on into the Land of the Living Media. Urg.

But it's taking a while. So, dear subscribers, don't give up hope just yet.

More to come.

Lost Dog String Band and a masquerade fundraiser

This weekend, Mardi Gras gets celebrated on Saturday, Feb. 25, at the Ken Kunkel Community Hall in Goldstream.

Below is the party poster. Lost Dog Old Time String Band, with Lynn Basham as caller, is going to provide some Applachian-style dance tunes, and there will be all kinds of goodies at the potluck. Here's the program of events.

The purpose of the festivities is to provide The Ester Republic with some funds to make the transition to a nonprofit organization (and, of course, to have a lot of fun—any excuse for a party is a good one!)

I'll be the Purple Publisher, and since I'm making an official Introduction Speech (short, I promise), I'll be easy to recognize even with a mask and costume. We'll have masks for those who couldn't get one in time, and we're encouraging mining-related costumes (but really, anything goes!). Ronn Murray Photography will be providing professional-quality portraits so you can immortalize your appearence in costume, too.

Bring a dish and a donation for the hat, and there's toasting and speechifying and a costume and mustache/beard contest (gents' and ladies' divisions)! Prizes and books and back issues, too!

We're not dead yet!

That Monty Python reference holds true: it may be months since Madame Publisher has posted on this blog, but she's still kicking. It's been a far-too-exciting fall and winter (a seemingly never-ending cold, a broken wrist, and serious debt in RepublicWorld), which interfered in the publication schedule. However, the Republic is heading for some pretty cool changes, some of which have already begun:

Twitter: yes, the Republic (although not really the Publisher of same) has joined the modern sound-bite era with a Twitter account. @EsterRepublic (the Publisher doesn't quite understand this esoteric 140-character means of communication, but she has the skilled help of two web-savvy teenagers).

Facebook: the Facebook page now has two new additional admins (the aforesaid web-savvy experts). Actual news may begin appearing.

Website redesign: after an editorial/marketing meeting yesterday, in which several excellent ideas were aired, the assembled group decided that it was time to redesign the website--to make it more functional, take advantage of all the nifty things that the web offers, and easier to find stuff. I actually have a team of people at work on this! Hoo!

Fundraiser: A massive fundraising shindig is being held at Hartung Hall on Feb. 25, 7 pm (that's a Saturday night): the Miners Masquerade Ball. That means costumes! There will be a toasting and speechifying contest (pay attention, Toastmasters!), a beard and moustache contest (men's and ladies' divisions), potluck food (bring edibles), live music (Lost Dog Old-Time String Band!), and DANCING. This will replace the Birthday Bashes, but there will likely be awards for the Publisher's Picks, and certainly prizes and games and other fun things. More info on this festival soon.

Foundation: The Republic is going to be working on creating a long-term support structure for the paper, etc. This will involve creating a nonprofit foundation (as discussed long ago and now revived): the People's Endowment for the Ester Republic, or PEER.

So that's the quickie update. More shall be appearing here in due time.

Revamping the Republic

Life has been exceedingly hectic of late, and looking at the date of my last post on this blog, I realize just exactly how hectic it has been. I've finally reached the point of maximum overdrive, and so in July I wrote an editorial threatening to shut down The Ester Republic if I didn't find help and a way to deal with the workload. I held a meeting in August to begin reorganizing the paper and book publishing biz along some sort of nonprofit lines, and gratifyingly, eight people showed up.

Whew. I wouldn't have to shut it all down after all.

Well, maybe. We had an excellent discussion, and came up with several ideas and directions to go in, which I described in my August editorial (and also notes from the meeting). I set up a few pages on the whole reorganization on the website, but since then I've been able to do almost nothing on the research I intended or the job descriptions. Jeremiah Shrock has been helping me, and has come up with a couple of draft recruitment posters, but in general, things have gotten even worse, and yours truly is pretty fried.

The paper is two issues behind (one is at the printer now) and about three months' worth of data entry in arrears. October looks to be the most intensely busy month in my entire career with the John Trigg Ester Library (annual membership meeting, seed program launch, final design meetings, grant proposal writing, etc.), but fortunately it is my last one as a board member.

So, November will be devoted to catching up at the Republic. I will be posting job descriptions here and on the revamp pages. Events related to the reorganization will also be posted here and there, and on Facebook. And the fancy new recruitment posters will also be coming up soon.

The Republic ain't dead yet (and neither is the Publisher, although lately she feels like something the cats dragged in). And the Publisher's Deadline will sail at Readers on the Run this weekend, so we aren't sunk yet, either.

Triple Mondo Edition: the Publisher Procrasinate

So, this week (FINALLY) the May/June/July issue of The Ester Republic will come out. It's going to be gargantuan: a minimum of 40 pages. It covers news from redistricting to community revenue sharing to work parties on the park and the stage to the Fourth of July and the Angry Young & Poor concert to gardening and organic agriculture to the EVFD patch collections to reviews of books and movies to who knows what all. And there are song lyrics and poems and photos galore. No view from Ray on the lump this time, though. "Where will it all end?" asks the image on the back cover. "Hit by a Truck," answers my editorial.

No rest for the wicked.

Independence Day in Ester

It's that time of year again! The Ester Fourth of July Parade will start at noon (ish) in the village square, pass the Judicial Review Booth (don't forget your judicial discernment enhancements, a.k.a. "bribes") in a semi-orderly and goofy fashion (after the veritable flock of youthfully driven and wildly decorated bicycles zooms past the judges at high speed), take a breather to impress the judges suitably, march (or jog or dance or stroll or drive or jig) down our illustrious and tree-lined Main Street, take a left (of course) onto Village Road, saunter past the Ida Lane Gazebo and the Ester Post Office, take another left onto the Old Nenana Highway, and trudge in the hot sun or rainy fog or clouds of mosquitoes or whathaveyou to the Ester Community Park, where said parade participants will turn left for a Final Time, there to participate in an Excellent Picnic & Party put on by the Ester Community Association, and receive Fabulous Prizes Recycled from Years (and Dumpsters) Past!

There will be GAMES and QUANTITIES OF WATER (most if it NOT in a glass but all over you if you don't move fast enough) and LOTS OF FOOD (if you bring donations or picnics) and loads of your neighbors and friends and dogs and kids and FUN FUN FUN!

If you would like to be one of the gaily-dressed and irreverent Paraders Extraordinaire, show up in the village of Ester at 11 am and heed the Directions of the Parade Director, who shall be recognizable by A Booming Voice (or maybe a loudspeaker or just a pointy finger) and (probably) A Silly Hat. Be Prepared to Sign In (this is so the judges and the Ester Republic newspaper publisher can tell who you are later, after all the notes and whatnot have been obscured by chocolate, water, beer, ice cream, and barbecue sauce), and award said aforementioned FABULOUS PRIZES.

Jest don't ferget that bribagery. And Food for the Picnic (bring extra to support the hungry paraders around you). And donations for the Pig Purchase, and to help out the Ester Community Association, which puts on this silliness every year.

As per usual, Do Not Expect Political Correctness. We like our parades Irreverent, Political, Punny, not necessarily Mature, and Not Too Long. Also Loud (the Ester Fire Department will be there, and the Red Hackle Bagpipe Band is coming again, YAY!). And with LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS. (Bring a sign.)

If you would like to be a Designated Spectator, be sure to Cheer and Clap a lot, because most of the parade participants are amateurs, and need encouragement. It takes a lot of chutzpah to make up a costume and a theme the night before and get all those drill team moves sorta down in the 24 hours before the parade. Spectators are also encouraged to bring Food, Beverages, and dogs and kids and their Uncle Ned.

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

Torture enabler coming to Fairbanks: We See Yoo!

As you can tell by the title of my post, I am in no way neutral when it comes to the crime committed by John Yoo, who enabled the torture of prisoners by the United States through his vile legal opinion for the Bush Administration. He has sullied the term "lawyer," and it is astonishing to me that he is still licensed to practice law. There is a warrant for his arrest for war crimes in Spain. (See also Fire John Woo! for more information.)

Yoo is coming as a guest speaker for the Alaska Bar Association convention, to be held at the Princess Hotel May 4, 5, & 6. Yoo is a featured speaker on Friday:

The Balance Between Security and Civil Liberties in Wartime

This program will be moderated by Jeff Feldman, and will put the views advanced by Professor Yoo and Mr. Wax on trial through an interactive program of cross-examination and Socratic dialog. Please join us in what we expect to be an electric discussion of the most pressing constitutional issues of our time.

Steve Wax is a federal public defender and the author of the book, Kafka Comes to America: Fighting for Justice in the War on Terror. This segment of the conference is scheduled from 8:30 am to noon on Friday in the Edgewater Room, according to the conference program.

After the conference, the ACLU and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship will hold a potluck and discussion with Wax at 6:30 pm.

Perhaps a little review of the history would be helpful. First, here's a definition of torture under US legal code.

(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

Note that those who conspire to commit torture are subject to the same punishment as those who actually do the torture:

(a) Offense.— Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

(b) Jurisdiction.— There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited in subsection (a) if—

(1) the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or
(2) the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender.

(c) Conspiracy.— A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.

John Yoo wrote the infamous "Torture Memo" that provided the Bush Administration with the justification it needed to commit torture (see the PDF: part 1 and part 2). The memo was eventually rescinded, but the man who authored it continues to defend it, and several others he wrote. By inviting John Yoo to speak at the convention, the Alaska Bar Association has, in effect, legitimized his position. It gives the appearance that he's seen not as a criminal of the very worst kind running around loose on a convoluted technicality; instead, he is a respected scholar with a defensible viewpoint. That is detestable, and shameful.

And the United States government, our CURRENT administration, continues to try to get the whole icky business swept under the rug.

I think the good people of Fairbanks need to get their feet on the street and protest the abomination that this man enabled, and protest the fact that he is out, free, and on the lecture circuit.

Gerry Mander in Alaska

It has been an insanely busy month, and more excitement is coming down the pike.

The big news is from ol' Gerry Mander hisself, from a recent triumphant presentation in Alaska of How to Screw the Voters. Here's what will happen to the districts in which Goldstream and Ester lie, according to the News-Miner:

One notable shift at home: Ester, Fox and much of the Goldstream Valley would join a giant rural House district that includes scores of communities from across the state. It would straddle the Fairbanks area and stretch completely across Alaska — from the southwestern village of Holy Cross north to Arctic Village and southeast again to Chitina.:

Does this make sense at ALL? There was some of this before, too, almost as ridiculous: Coghill's district stretches from North Pole to Valdez.



Here's what Wikipedia says about gerrymandering:

In the process of setting electoral districts, rather than using uniform geographic standards, Gerrymandering is a practice of political corruption that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating geographic boundaries to create partisan, incumbent-protected, and neutral districts. The resulting district is known as a gerrymander.…

The two aims of gerrymandering are to maximize the effect of supporters' votes and to minimize the effect of opponents' votes. One strategy, packing, is to concentrate as many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. In some cases this may be done to obtain representation for a community of common interest, rather than to dilute that interest over several districts to a point of ineffectiveness. A second strategy, cracking, involves spreading out voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district. The strategies are typically combined, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type in order to secure even greater representation for voters of another type.

Gerrymandering is effective because of the wasted vote effect. By packing opposition voters into districts they will already win (increasing excess votes for winners) and by cracking the remainder among districts where they are moved into the minority (increasing votes for eventual losers), the number of wasted votes among the opposition can be maximized. Similarly, with supporters holding narrow margins in the unpacked districts, the number of wasted votes among supporters is minimized.

While the wasted vote effect is strongest when a party wins by narrow margins across multiple districts, gerrymandering narrow margins can be risky when voters are less predictable. To minimize the risk of demographic or political shifts swinging a district to the opposition, politicians can instead create more packed districts, leading to more comfortable margins in unpacked ones.

There is a public hearing in Fairbanks April 19, Tuesday, 2 to 6 pm at the Fairbanks City Hall, City Council Chamber on the 2nd floor: If you would like to comment on the utter monstrosity of a jerrymandered redistricting, please come to this hearing! If you are in another city, other hearings are taking place also and you can find out more from the Alaska Redistricting Board's website. PLEASE NOTE that I have also heard that these hearings will end at 4 pm, not 6, so I don't know if they've been curtailed, expanded, or if this is just a rumor. Getting there early if you can will be important. I will be taking time off work to get there.

Interesting how they timed it for most people's working hours, hmm?

At any rate, you might consider whether it is equitable or reasonable for Ester's Senate district to include--and no, I am NOT kidding--Sitka, or for us to be in the same district as, say, Arctic Village. This won't help the Bush and it sure won't help Ester or Fairbanks or Goldstream (or Sitka or Holy Cross) to be properly represented. This is sheer stupidity. There are two official options, both of which are clearly attempts to split voting blocks, with no regard for whether the residents of these areas have any commonalities of need or location. This won't serve anybody well. There are a few privately-suggested plans, also shown on the Board's website. There are several organizations proposing options.

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

JTEL survey and some thoughts on the library

In the course of the last few years and working on the library, it's struck me how much the vision of what the Ester library should be has grown: we've gone from viewing the library as a glorified book exchange (by "we," I mean the ECA library committee and the JTEL board) to working hard to create a true library and community space. Any venture like this, where many people from a large cross-section of the local population are involved, eventually takes on a life of its own and grows beyond what the founders or early participants envisioned or even wanted. It starts to become part of the community itself, to be defined by it and also to help define what the community is. Events and institutions are shaped by people, but people are also shaped by those events and institutions. I think this can cause some discomfort—all people may not necessarily like where it's going, or where it means the community is going.

Personally, I think that this growth of vision is fantastic. I've always liked Ester, in an abstract sort of way as the village closest to my childhood home on Ester Dome Summit. It's felt like a place with a center, a heart. Yet, it also has all the flaws of a small town, which I've reluctantly had to accept, and I've seen Ester divide into some ugly pieces during crisis, as well as come together in a neighborly, noble way during other crises. The problem with small towns is that they can become parochial, suspicious and jealous places where difference of opinion or change is unacceptable. The people living there can become so fond of the image of the place that anything that exposes or challenges or changes the image—the messenger—becomes the enemy, and never mind if the image is true, or if the image and/or the reality could be better.

Yet no place is perfect, and a neighborly, friendly, independent yet welcoming community is not something that just happens. You have to create it, tend it, rather like a garden. I think that's one vital function served by the Ester Community Association: it tends that neighborliness by helping to maintain the social fabric of Ester through events and through tending the actual physical environs of the village.

The Ester Community Park is another really good example. It's maintained by volunteers and the ECA. It's a physical center to the village. Any town needs gathering spots, locations that people can come together in. Ester is small, but it has the Golden Eagle, the post office, and the park as physical "market squares" where people interact. The physical structure of a place helps determine whether it encourages meeting and talking and all those other community-building events (parties, barbeques, hanging out), or whether it does the opposite and discourages human interaction. The park actually creates a space to meet—and thus creates community, village life. That's one reason why farmers' markets are so important: they strengthen communities because they create a physical space where people actually talk and hang out and do things together—which is what a community does. A place with a bunch of buildings in it, a "bedroom community," isn't a village. It's not a destination, it's a place where people store themselves in between the times when they are in some other spot where they really live—living being all those things you do when you are interacting with people, creating things, enjoying your life. The park, and gathering places like it, helps create a place where we live.

Those spaces in Ester each have their devotees, their clientele. They aren't neutral, because no place can be all things to all people. The Ester market is an example of something that happens at the park that attracts a certain group of people that you won't see at any other events or places. The same thing is true of the rink and the soccer field. The entire park brings in quite a variety of people, but some people never go there, or go only once a year. Same thing with the post office, or the Eagle, or Hartung Hall. The music jams at the hall and at the bar bring yet another group. In the Ester vicinity, there are other community-creating spots, like the Annex, or Calypso Farm, or Gold Hill Liquor. All of these add to the liveliness and sheer pleasure of being part of the Ester community. If we only had the Eagle, or only the park, or only the post office, our town would be poorer for it—and we'd have to create something that would fill that void, or lapse into being a suburb of Fairbanks.

The library just hasn't been able to be a gathering spot, really. It's been too small, too crowded. Now, however, with the Ida Lane Clausen Gazebo finished, that's beginning to change. We've got a new hang out, a new and different place to create and tend our community life. The fundraisers we sponsor are important for that community-building, and are held at places that themselves help enhance village life: the Eagle, the Malemute, the Annex, the gazebo.

When the library building is done, the dynamics of the village will change further—there will be yet another spot where community can be created, and it will reflect some of the characteristics of existing gathering spots, but it will also be different, because it will attract its own clientele, new people who may have lived in the vicinity but never participated in village life before because there was nothing really here that was right for them. So the new building will in fact change Ester. I think it will make it better, stronger, a nicer place to be. This is something that the Noel Wien Library and its library van simply cannot do for us. They can enhance our intellectual life, and the van can enhance our social life once a month, and if we go all the way downtown we can do our living at the library, in Fairbanks—but having a library, a real library, right in the village, will add something wonderful to the village and much much larger than the books and movies on the library's shelves. Being a vibrant part of Ester's community life is what the Ester library is growing into, and it will be far beyond what the JTEL has been over the last decade. It's becoming much more than what I ever envisioned, certainly—and I'm very glad of that.

The survey that the JTEL is conducting right now, about the library and the community, and what's important about libraries, has me thinking about all this. Working on the budgets and the plans and preparing for grants and writing up policies and all that has been a contributing factor, too. We're creating something larger and better than ourselves, something that will outlast us, and, I hope, make Ester grow into something better than it is now. That's worth working for.

Addendum: I spoke with Judy Stauffer this evening about my essay above, and she reminded me of an important point. Part of the reason that we continue to have a post office with a postmaster, and not just a Fairbanks contract station, is because we have a library here in the village. Libraries, like schools or museums, are considered cultural institutions, and such institutions are the mark of true municipalities (as opposed to, say, suburbs of towns or cities). At least, we were told that this was one of the requirements for maintaining a post office in a village back when Ruth Jasper retired as postmaster and Ester was faced with the potential loss of its post office—or the demotion of its only legal existence to a Fairbanks station-for-hire. The other institutions that we needed were: a village government or community association, a newspaper, a park, and a fire or police station. This may no longer be the case (I haven't been able to verify or refute it). Still, it IS something to consider.

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.