Fertile Ground USA...Celebrating the people behind the plow

Annie Myers, NYU student and essayist for the New Amsterdam Public Market has posted a report on her website Thoughts on the Table, called The Choice to Farm: Of Five Farmers, and the Movement They Joined. It's fascinating. 

As an historian of the Victory Garden movement during WWI and WWII, I'd like to throw my endorsement to Eat the View. What is it they say about revolutions...begin everywhere at once?   

To me, the idea of a vegetable garden on the White House lawn is much more than symbolic; the Victory Gardens of WWI and WWII had important impacts...   The Victory Gardens of World War I and World War II - and the garden efforts of the Great Depression - helped Americans successfully negotiate hard times. These gardens helped the family budget; improved dietary practices; reduced the food mile and saved fuel; enabled America to export more food to our allies; beautified communities; enabled every American to contribute to a national effort; and helped bridge social, ethnic, class and cultural differences during a time when cooperation was widely needed. Gardens were an expression of solidarity, of patriotism, and shared sacrifice. They were found everywhere...schools, homes, and throughout public spaces in communities all over the nation.  No American was too famous or too important to garden.  No gardening effort was too small. Every effort counted.  Americans did their bit.  And it mattered, and not just in a symbolic sense, but by producing real results.   Consider this: In WWI, the Federal Bureau of Education nationalized a school garden program and funded it with War Department monies. Millions of students gardened at school, at home, and in their communities. A national Liberty Garden (later Victory Garden) program was initiated that called upon all Americans to garden for the nation, and the world. In part because of the success of home gardeners (and careful food preservation), the U.S. was able to significantly increase exports to our starving European Allies.   During 1943, an estimated 3/5ths of Americans participated in some sort of gardening activity, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who planted a Victory Garden on the White House Lawn, and Vice President Henry Wallace, who gardened with his son at the VP's residence. Nearly 40% of the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed stateside during 1943 were grown in school, home and community gardens. In addition to providing much-needed food, gardening helped Americans accept the nation's plurality, providing a positive experience that transcended race, class and socioeconomic divisions. That bridged rural/urban differences. They provided a way for all Americans to provide a service to the nation. Gardens did not represent empty rhetoric or symbolism...through gardening efforts, Americans made significant contributions to the war effort.   Our nation has many needs right now.   We all share concerns about our food system.  Families need help with their personal economies. Entire communities are food-insecure. We have a tenuous connection with the land. Obesity is an epidemic. Environmental concerns - and declining oil supplies - dictate a need to recreate more sustainable and local food systems.   A revival of the successful national gardening programs of the past could help in many, many ways. This would not be a costly program. All of the educational materials that support school, home and community gardens (and urban agriculture) is available through existing government agencies and private organizations. A current government-sponsored program (through the USDA, state land grant institutions, and county government) fields thousands of highly-trained Master Gardeners, who could be called upon to share their expertise with school, home and community gardeners.   What is needed to make this idea a reality is an "ask" and a "do" by our new President, which is why I'm a strong supporter of Roger Doiron's Eat the View effort.  By putting a vegetable garden on the White House lawn, millions of Americans would be encouraged to follow the First Family's example and garden.  We are so eager for change, so eager to engage again in a civic sense.  Americans would be inspired to plant food for their families, and their communities. To perhaps share extra produce with food banks and the growing number of hungry in our nation.  To learn more about our food system, and what needs to change.   This would  not be symbolic, but rather, would show Americans that the personal actions they take as individuals, when combined with the actions of millions of other Americans, can make a vast difference.  It's time to put a vegetable garden (BACK) on the White House lawn, and I'm hoping our new First Family will lead the way.     

Rose Hayden-Smith, M.A. Ed., M.A., PhD Candidate
Food and Society Policy Fellow, Acting County Director, University of California CE

Frederick L. Kirschenmann’s Remarks Upon Accepting the Glynwood Medal for Distinguished Leadership in Sustainable Agriculture
October 27, 2008, New York City
Thank you, Judy, for those kind words.  You know for this North Dakota farmer it is truly unbelievable to be given this kind of recognition.  I thought about it a lot when they called me and told me they wanted to do this.  I was reminded of last summer when I was back up in North Dakota on my farm for my vacation.  I always try to go to the bar at least one evening and meet with my fellow farmers and check in to see where things are really at.  This last time I was up there, after a couple of beers one of my neighbors turned to me and said: “So Fred, you’ve been involved in all this stuff for the last 35 years.  Tell me what’s changed?”  It’s a great question and you know it’s always hard to be able to point to anything that you can say “because I did this, that happened”.  We had a nice lovely long conversation about the state of agriculture and the kinds of changes that we need, all recognizing together that none of us have really been able to address all of the issues that we need to address to bring about the changes we need. 

 

Sustainable agriculture is all about change, so I want to take a few minutes to share with you some of my perspective about the kind of challenges we are likely to face as we move into the future and therefore two big issues we need to address.

 

Because sustainability is about the future – about keeping something going, maintaining something into the future -- I want to first share some of the things that I see coming at us in the future that we have to prepare for. I hope you will see that there will be incredible opportunities for change that we have not seen in the past 60 years.  While some of the things that we will be facing will be enormously challenging, they are also going to present us with unprecedented opportunities to change the food system in ways that we need to accomplish if we are interested in sustainability. 

 

So what are some of these changes?  First of all, we’re going to be moving into a very different energy future than we’ve had for the past 150 years.  For the last 150 years we have been living in a world which has had access to stored, concentrated energy (primarily coal, oil and natural gas) which has been stored up in the earth’s crust for millions of years.  We have mined all the easily accessible stored energy in the last 150 years to support our industrial economy and it has been very effective.  But the era of cheap, stored, concentrated energy is now essentially over and so that resource so vital to the industrial economy will become increasingly expensive. I know that oil has gone from $146 a barrel to some $60 again now, but it will continue to trend upward.  Even T. Boone Pickens is saying that we should expect that oil will hit $350 a barrel in the next 10 years.  Is he right about that?  I don’t know, but that’s the direction we’re headed.  And since all alternative energy is current, dispersed energy, and therefore less efficient, it will always be more expensive than the cheap energy we got so used to.

 

Our current food system is enormously dependent on this cheap energy on every level.  On the farm, the fertilizers we use are all based on petroleum energy, the pesticides we use are all based on petroleum energy, the farm equipment we use is all manufactured from petroleum energy. It’s all based on petroleum energy. As energy costs go up, this current food system will become increasingly untenable – and it’s not just on the farm, it’s also the processing and distribution - our whole food system is enormously dependent on cheap energy.  We’re not going to have the cheap energy, so the question we have to ask ourselves is what kind of food system can continue to provide us hopefully with better quality food than we currently have and that does so with much less energy. 

 

That’s a major challenge that we have to look at.  It provides us with enormous opportunities to creatively rethink the food system.  The really good news is that there are a lot of individual farmers, some of them in this room, who have already begun to make that transition moving from an energy-intensive farming system to a knowledge-intensive farming system. There are many creative examples out there.

 

The second change that we have to anticipate concerns our fresh water supply.  Our current industrial food system, as well as the rest of our industrial economy, has been able to be successful because we’ve had enormous quantities of surplus fresh water available.  Those water supplies have accumulated at least since the Ice Age.  We have been drawing down those fresh water resources all across the planet at an absolutely unsustainable rate.  The High Plains Aquifer, which provides much of the irrigation water for the central United States, has been drawn down by half since 1960.  We draw it down by about 1.3 trillion gallons of water each year faster than it can be recharged.  We can’t continue to do that indefinitely.  Fortunately, in this country only one fifth of our acreage is dependent on irrigation; in places like China 80% is dependent on irrigation for grain production.  They draw down groundwater by 10 feet every year in some places. 

 

We often forget how much water is really embedded in the food we eat.  We each need about 4 liters of water to supply the daily liquid needs for our bodies, but we consume up to 2,000 liters of water to meet our food requirements from the current industrial food system.  Every time we drink a cup of coffee there are 140 liters of water embedded in that cup when you include all the water needed to raise the coffee beans, process it, etc.  Every time we eat a pound of boneless beefsteak there are 2,000 gallons of water embedded in it.  We can’t continue to do that.  So we need to think about a food system that continues to provide us with good, healthy, nutritious, pleasurable eating as we address these new challenges.

 

The third big elephant in the room is, of course, climate.  It isn’t just the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are going to change our climate.  The climate that we’ve had over the last hundred years has been, as a National Academy of Science study put it in 1975, “abnormally stable”.  This is not the norm for the planet, so we are very likely going to see much more unstable climates in our future. 

 

The current food system is highly dependent on specialization, and specialized farming systems require stable climates to remain productive.  In Iowa today, 92% of all cultivated land is in just 2 crops:  corn and soybeans.  So we need to have a climate that is consistently favorable to corn and soybeans but we’re not likely to have that in the future. So how do we redesign our farming systems in Iowa to make them more sustainable in unstable climates? 

 

I think we know how to answer these questions but there are incredible barriers to change. We have made enormous investments in infrastructure and in intellectual and political capital that is all insisting that the food system we have today is the best. So we are determined to keep it going. To that end we make huge investments in new technologies and other Lone Ranger approaches to keep our industrial food system going.  But it’s not likely that it can be sustained in our new future. When we anticipate the aggregated effect of our new energy, water and climate future it is not likely that we can overcome all of the changes with technological fixes.  A new food and farming system will need to be created.

 

This is where some of the humble experiments that are taking place at the Glynwood Center, the Stone Barns Center, and other places around the world become so important.  Thirty years ago people looking at such alternatives were saying: “You gotta be crazy, this is not the future of agriculture.”  But now even some experts are saying: “Gee, maybe we need to be looking at this.”  And I think we’re going to see that more and more as we move into the future. 

 

Then there is a second big issue we now need to consider.  Those of us who are interested in sustainable agriculture have to fundamentally change our focus. For the last 30 years I think all of us, including myself, were looking at sustainability as a steady state phenomenon.  I looked at my farming operation in North Dakota and said “OK, in order to make my farm sustainable, what changes do I need to make so that it will be a sustainable farm?” I assumed that the context of my farm was basically going to stay the same.  Now I know it’s not.  Instead of thinking about steady state sustainability – how do we modify a few things, green it up, make it more efficient, etc. – we have to start thinking about resilient sustainability.  How can we redesign our food and farming systems to make them resilient in the light of the shocks and disturbances coming at us? How can we design systems that can absorb the shocks of depleting fresh water resources, unstable climates and much more expensive energy, and still produce a reliable source of healthy, nutritious, tasty food?  That’s the new thinking we need to entertain. 

 

That’s going to be very difficult for us, because to create resilient systems we need to incorporate redundancy and diversity into the system. And our current food system is captivated by an ideology which claims that efficiency accomplished through specialization, simplification and economies of scale, is the only way to be economically sustainable.  Such efficiency tends to eliminate redundancy and diversity.  Consequently, it’s going to be very difficult for us to invest in a future that builds redundancy into our systems. 

 

But farmers have long understood the need for resilience.  I learned about resilience in farming when I was about 8 years old.  My father started farming in 1930. Those first few years were in the middle of the dust bowl.  So he learned the importance of resilience and frugality through direct experience.  Consequently he was determined to teach his young son about the importance of frugality and resilience, so each time he sold a load of wheat or an animal, he would put the receipt in one box.  Whenever he bought something he would put the invoice in another box.  Every so often, at least once a month, we would sit down at the table together and he would go over it with me and show me the money that went out and the money that came in.  After doing this for a period of time it suddenly occurred to me as I was looking at these numbers that we were earning much more from our crop production than we were from our animal production.  I turned to him one day and said “Dad, so we’re making more money on crops than the animals, why do we still have cows?”  He looked at me and he said “Because they don’t get hailed out.”  For my father it wasn’t just about maximum production and short term return, it was about resilient production and long term return. 

 

These are some of the cultural shifts we have to anticipate if we are to have a sustainable food and farming future. I’m very hopeful that we can accomplish this difficult transition because we already have some of the models out there.  And Milton Friedman once made an important observation.  He reminded us that change rarely happens without a crisis, but when the crisis comes you have to have ideas floating around to direct that change.  I think that’s a very important concept for us to keep in mind.  We’re not going to be short of crises in our food and agriculture system over the next three decades or so. The question is: do we have sufficient ideas floating around to direct that change toward a more sustainable food and farming system?  That’s why the work that the Glynwood Center, the Stone Barns Center, Just Food, and others are doing is so important  - they are floating some of those ideas around that will enable us, when the crisis happens, to move the change in the right direction – that’s why  I think these ventures that we’re involved in together are so important.   

Why are farmers an endangered species? Read what Andy Sarjahani's says in his blog, Living the Intense Dream: Well, the people standing behind that booth at the Farmer’s Market aren’t exactly growing younger. The average age of farmers in the United States is 60 and only 1-1.5% (depending on the source) of the United States has chosen the agrarian livelihood.

Op-Ed by Denise O'Brien in Des Moines Register
June 22, 2008

In all of our reading about the floods and rebuilding Iowa, there is no mention of the role of agriculture in these recent events. Out of this catastrophe needs to come some understanding that industrial agriculture has caused many of the issues that happen downriver from cultivated land. A deterioration of good conservation and resource-management practices over the last 50 years has helped make these "rain events" even more catastrophic.

There was some discussion about this after the floods of '93, but agriculture policy continued to ignore the environment and implemented more policies that allowed Iowa to become the sacrifice area for agribusiness corporations, putting profit before stewardship.

Sen. Tom Harkin worked hard to get the Conservation Security Program in place but has had to continually fight for appropriations for this project. A good many Iowans understand the importance of agriculture in this state, but few understand that while Mother Nature may send us gully washers, human beings have added to the devastation by draining wetlands, plowing up waterways and planting only corn and soybeans.

There are many things that can be done to have agriculture that is good for the economy, the environment and the people; it is called sustainable agriculture. Many innovative farmers in the state have been working diligently to retain their soil while making a profit. Many, many more farmers need to embrace conservation and stewardship in order to help prevent future catastrophes such as the floods of '08.

Iowans have a strong work ethic and a strong desire to make things better. We can do that if we work together to retain one of our most precious resources - the soil.

- Denise O'Brien and Larry Harris, Atlantic

post by Chris Bedford, Center for Economic Security
chrisbedford@charter.net

On June 3, 2008, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) chaired a remarkable hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee on "Energy Market Manipulation". The entire hearing is available for viewing at the C-SPAN website.   George Soros, Michael Greenberger of the University of Maryland School of Law, and Mark Cooper, Research Director for the Consumer Federal of America were among those who testified.   The hearing was "remarkable" for its blunt language and depth of honesty rarely witnessed in the kabuki dance of swirling lobbyists in Washington. In essence, the experts agreed our pension funds, banks, and hedge funds have taken "a position" in oil futures, the amount of which is neither known nor regulated. Senator Phil Gramm (formerly of Texas) inserted language in a bill in 2000 that moved responsibility for exemption from regulation to control speculation from the speculator to the public. This meant that instead of a speculator having to request for an exemption from speculation regulations dealing with transparency, the minimum payments in a margin, etc -- the public had to challenge any deal they thought bad -- a fact that basically deregulated the futures market.   So, we have today the core capitalist institutions that manage our investments, pension funds and guard our savings buying oil futures in the name of their fiduciary responsibility. And, as George Soros said in the hearing, "oil in the ground today is worth more than oil at the pump." So these "good guy" investors as well as greedy hedge fund maniacs are driving the futures market for oil.   The result has been a prediction by one investment bank of $200/barrel oil very soon. Of course, this bank is thought to be a holder of large futures contracts that will benefit from $200/barrel oil. A conflict of interest? Well, in this deregulated market this is but a small crime.   Michael Greenberger pointed out that the largest owner of fuel oil in New England is a New York Bank. The federal regulators treat this bank as if it were an oil company, producing oil -- not a speculator. Senator Olympia Snow of Maine spoke eloquently about the impact of $4.50/gallon home heating oil on her constituents. Their pension fund may be liquid but they have to choose between heating their homes and eating and healthcare. But I digress.   With no margin requirements, no transparency, a weak and weakening dollar (in some measure because of the speculation) and real growing demand for oil -- financial speculators are creating a massive speculative bubble in oil.   In the process, they have impacted farmers engaged in oil intensive industrial agriculture. The high price of petroleum based inputs (+ land rents) is effectively confiscating the "incredible profits" of $6 corn. In turn, some of this capital that controls the price of oil futures has invested in commodity futures because of the link between oil and industrial commodity production. A safe bet!?   In my opinion, the speculative bubble and its consequences constitute another important reason we have to disconnect our food system from petroleum to the largest degree possible. Organic farming techniques, particularly those developed by the Rodale Institute, point to one way forward.   Organic no-till farming builds soil health, sequesters carbon, dramatically reduces energy requirements, and strengthens our ecosystems, the real marketplace where our future will be decided. The current Farm Bill's support for oil intensive agricultural production (including ethanol) condemns us to the excesses of this situation. We can't wait for the next Farm Bill to turn this ship around.   Oh, the price of oil. Mark Cooper of the CFA testified that the real price of gas at the pump, if you remove speculative pressures, would be $2.50/gallon.  

Now that the deal is done, waves of comments -- raving, scathing, maddening, praising -- are flowing across the media waves regarding that love poem of food policy pork and peril, the 2008 Farm Bill. The dust is settling and now I think all that can be said is that most of it is bad, but some of it is good. And next time it will hopefully get better. But don’t take my word for it, there are lots of opinions out there. Here are but just a few to chew on:

From Dan Barber's NY Times Op-Ed. Dan is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and the creative director of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture:

No one wants farmers to suffer, especially chefs. But if we’re spending $20 billion or so a year on farm subsidies, we ought to invest in the foods we eat. And I mean eat, not process into something that resembles food. That means fewer subsidies for grains like corn and soy, and more help for growers of broccoli and tomatoes.How do we do this? We could start by rewarding diversity over yield, basing subsidy payments not on how many acres of corn a farmer grows but on the number of varieties of crops he plants. We could also link payments to, say, the efficiency of nitrogen fixation (crop rotation helps the soil retain nitrogen, so farmers don’t need to add it with chemicals) or equate them with how much a farm helps soil and water conservation. In effect, tie payments to plant health.

From the official press release of the National Family Farm Coalition:

George Naylor, an Iowa corn and soybean farmer, said, “While other countries are rebuilding their food stocks or considering establishing Strategic Grain Reserves, our Congress and the president put its head in the sand and continues to leave America’s food security in the hands of Wall Street speculators. By letting prices fluctuate without any price floor or government reserves, the Farm Bill only heightens economic uncertainty for both family farmers and consumers in an already precarious economy.
[full press release posted below]
 
From Old MacDonald had a farm bill by Debra Eschmeyer on Grist :

One way to interpret farm policy is to follow the money. According to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Cargill's profits increased nearly 1,000 percent from $280 million in FY 1997-98 to $2.34 billion by FY 2006-07. Add to that pile of profits the $35 billion in indirect subsidies that the industrial animal factories (owned and controlled by corporations like Cargill) reaped by being able to buy feed crops at 20-25 percent below the cost of production.

From The enemy of my enemy: Why a Bush veto of the Farm Bill is bad for the food movement (and the world) by Elanor on The Ethicurean:

Distract locally, deregulate globally:  The administration’s mainstream message (and yes, I did just link to Fox News, my own historic first) sounds an awful lot like the rhetoric used by some progressive reform groups. Officials take every opportunity to toss around “wealthy farmer” references as rationale for why they think we should limit government subsidy payments. But officials have also suggested that if we don’t reform subsidies, it would “complicate our relationship with trading partners” — in other words, it would majorly piss off the World Trade Organization. Something tells me that they care a lot more about that than they do about the mis-use of some ag subsidy dollars. I mean, really — has the Bush Administration ever seen a loophole it didn’t like?

From Ari Le Vaux, Talking farm and food politics with the candidate:
Barack Obama: The Farm Bill has many positive provisions, in particular, an increase in federal funding for the development of renewable fuels, which will help reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil. The legislation provides an additional $10.3 billion for nutrition assistance programs, such as food stamps and school lunches. Although the Farm Bill is far from perfect, I support the legislation because it recognizes the important role of America’s farmers and ranchers, and the need to develop our rural economy. It is regrettable that John McCain [who voted against it] does not agree. While the Farm Bill does lower significantly the income limits of farmers eligible for subsidies, it doesn’t provide as much reform as I have advocated.

From Gus Schumacher’s Why We Need the Farm Bill, Boston Globe, May 26, 2008:
But there is no question that the bill is better than the veto option proposed by the president. By using his veto pen, President Bush wanted to extend the existing, flawed, and out-of-date 2002 farm bill into the future…This new law makes an unprecedented commitment to support locally produced food and expand access to these healthy products for all. Expanded resources will support additional free fruit and vegetable vouchers for seniors at farmers' markets, such as at the new Allston/Brighton farmers' market and the three new farmers' markets located near health clinics in Dorchester. It will also provide new sources of loan capital to develop locally grown food businesses and support the many farmers in New England making the transition to organic systems. The new bill allows schools flexibility to purchase locally in their school meals programs, to create new markets for local farmers, and to bring just-picked fresh fruits and vegetables to local schools.

From Michael Pollan’s letter to his listserv readers
Here's what I think happened. Critics of farm-policy-as usual-- and I count myself among them-- did a much better job of demonizing subsidies than they did proposing alternative forms of farm support that would have won over some percentage of the farmers now receiving subsidies. The whole discourse depicting subsidies as a form of welfare -- payments to celebrities, rich people in cities, mega-farms etc-- convinced many farmers that the ultimate goal of the farm bill's critics was to abolish subsidies, rather than to develop a new set of incentives that would encourage farmers to grow real food and take good care of their land. Had the reformers crafted proposals that were easy to explain and attractive to even just a segment of commodity-crop farmers, we could have made much more progress. 

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Holding a faded Smucker's jar full of steaming coffee, Daniel Dermitzel showed us around the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture, a non-profit he founded along with Katherine Kelly in 2004. Dedicated to promoting urban ag, this Center develops training and research programs for farmers as well as operating a certified organic vegetable farm. On this cold March day, I looked longingly at the high tunnels on his property, thinking how much warmer it would be inside than out. He invited us into one, a huge cavern of white, with rows of newly planted tomato seedlings in the ground. The plants looked a bit under the weather. "Maybe you can tell me what the problem is!" Daniel seemed truly open to suggestions which, it seems, is the nature of this place. It's all about experimentation, trying things together to see what works and what doesn't.

Originally from Braunschweig, Germany, Daniel gave up his day job in television news in sunny southern California to get back to the land. And here he is, in Kansas City of all places, in the land. And as a German, he struck me as someone who is always pensive about the meaning of existence, about what it means to farm. "I discovered something when I began farming here," he announced to our little crowd. "You can't cheat. We in society get away with cheating a lot, cheating in so many ways, but here, there is no way to cheat. Taking shortcuts like that is perhaps part of being human but we can learn from nature. If you don't water the plants, they die. If you don't take care of your garden, you have nothing. In farming, if we take shortcuts, we usually pay some kind of price for that later. " He paused while he thought about what he just said. "Ah well," he mumbled as he scratched his head, looking like he just wanted to finish his coffee before he said another thing.

When I called him later to ask him to expand on that concept, he was reluctant to comment too much, instead saying, "There's a change that we're all going through. We have to combine our desire and understanding for change in this time with caution and care. There's a lot invested in some sort of change. People are looking for some kind of answer. Is our work here at the KC Center of Urban Ag part of the answer?" He didn't seem too sure. Although no one alone is THE answer, I think they are onto something big.