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Frank Reese shows us what a "real" bird looks like from his American Standard of Perfection 2010 from the APA

November 24, 2011: Being a heritage turkey farmer, you would have thought Frank Reese from Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch would be up to his own neck in turkey feathers the day before Thanksgiving, but instead, Reese was calmly walking amongst what was left of his flock. “There were four thousand birds here last week, now there are just a thousand.”

Heritage turkey is in demand this year and many heritage turkey growers sold out way before Thanksgiving. That’s a good sign.

“We sold out a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving,” said Todd Wickstrom, co-founder of Heritage Foods USA. "In our first year, we sold 750 heritage turkeys and this year we sold out at 6,000. We could sell more." Wickstrom says that they have been working with Frank and his network since their inception but there continues to be a dearth of heritage poultry growers. "There are so few USDA facilities that will accommodate the small farmer, it becomes an expensive proposition and not many farmers want to take that risk.”

_Reese is almost as rare as the heritage birds he is working to save. He is known as the Godfather of American Poultry, and in fact, according to Farm Forward, is the only farmer recognized by the USDA as a heritage poultry producer.

Reese defines heritage turkey by the American Poultry Association’s Standard of Perfection which lists 8 varieties of turkeys: Black, Bronze, Narragansett, White Holland, Slate, Bourbon Red, Beltsville Small White, and Royal Palm [the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy also lists other varieties.]

A main difference between these birds and the ones you normally find in your grocery store is that these birds mate naturally -- in fact that is a pre-requisite to being a Heritage bird. The Broad breasted white, the variety that almost all industrial turkey producers use, has to be artificially inseminated. These heritage birds also fly – Reese never clips their tails – and flying is something that his birds do regularly, landing on barn roofs, telephone polls, and trees.

“I just let them be turkeys,” says Reese.

Frank runs what most folks would consider an unusual turkey farm. Turkeys were strolling up the driveway, wandering in the yard, standing on fence poles and hanging out behind the barn, strutting their stuff and giving shrill waves of warning sounds when intruders approached.

Wickstrom says when he took his children to visit Reese, it was like landing in some kind of exotic bird sanctuary -- birds were everywhere. “My kids loved it,” says Todd. So did Todd. In fact, says Todd, who was a leader of a local Slow Food Convivium at the time, it was the trip that helped him decide to join Patrick Martins in defense of these birds that eventually led to the creation of Heritage Foods USA. “I never thought that I would be describing a turkey as beautiful, but these birds were absolutely gorgeous. The American Standard Bronze, or Bronze, is one of the most beautiful animals I have ever seen.”

Reese puts out a warning to any would-be heritage turkey owner: “These are crazy birds,” says Reese. “They like to get into mischief. They roost on the hatch, they fly around, they’re loud, they get into everything, they eat a ton of food. Make sure you want to live with these birds first before you get into business with them!” Reese recommends that new growers start small, not owning more than 50 or 60 poults.

Between Reese and his farming partners, they have over 10-14,000 birds throughout the year. “Enough to get a processor’s attention,” says Reese assuredly. “In this business, you have to go big or get real small.”

He walked back to attend to his turkeys but turned around for one last question. What are you having for Thanksgiving this year? “A bronze!” he shouted and then smiled.  
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Commercial Urban Farm Trainees 2011
Hearing about Growing Power and seeing it are two very different things. I am part of the Commercial Urban Farm training program and the first thing we do during our first weekend here is take the Will Allen tour. 3 hours later we have seen every square inch of the 2 acres farm with 14 greenhouses/hoop houses, 500 chickens and a pen full of Pygmy goats. They grow greens everywhere they can, hanging from ceilings, stuffed under aquaponic tanks that are full of perch and tilapia, filling every corner. Watercress grows on top of the fish tanks and beautiful large ornamental plants are scattered about and add an element of peace and serenity.

Will's mantra is "It's all about the soil," and he is not kidding. Soil is their number one crop [grass is the number one crop in the US, just fyi] and they take growing it very seriously. All things compost, that is the secret, from the forks to the plates to rotten tomatoes. Mounds of compost are piled outside in various stages of decomposition which are then fed to the worms - african worms, south american worms, it's a very international thing. Worms, Will says, are food hogs. One worm can eat one pound of food per day.

Will Allen pioneered Growing Power almost 20 years ago with the vision of  “creating  a more just food system.” The roots of success, he says, are the "Seven Ps" - passion, performance, perseverance, pride, patience, partners and play.

They might be non profit, but they are actually big believers in Profit - 50% of their income comes from growing and selling their own food and offering services.

Another impressive thing about Growing Power is their commitment to people and to jobs. They have 60 employees and all are PAID WELL. Part of GP's mission is providing permanent jobs with a decent living wage. In 18 years, they have never laid a person off. How many big corporations today say that?
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Chris Bedford, founder of Center for Economic Security in Montague, Michigan, recently offered his eloquent commentary via a listserv called Comfood on our current food and farming situation [some would say crisis] and how the Food Safety Modernization bill will impact our communities, should it pass.

Read on for his clear and articulate explanation of why TRANSPARENCY is at the heart of a needed political revolution in this country.

So this Thanksgiving, I say I am thankful to have a thoughtful, honest and tireless advocate like Chris who helps us all keep it real. Thank you, Chris!

From Comfood listserv, Fri Nov 26, 3:30am, in response to dialouge on impact of FSMA:

As a small farm advocate and activist who actually works in the local food system,  as a political organizer and the designer of campaigns to restrict unbridled corporate power, as an environmental activist who believes our health is directly determined by our diet, particularly how our food is grown, the link between the health of our democracy and the health of our soil is obvious. It deals with the concept of food citizenship.

John McKnight in his excellent and important book, "The Abundant Community", makes the distinction between food consumers and food citizens. A consumer relies on faceless experts enforcing increasing complex regulations to determine their quality of life and food.  A citizen takes responsibility for not just the source of their food, but the system that produces and distributes food.  A citizen is engaged in a continuing conversation with farmers, neighbors, and their community on food as an essential element for community health, social justice, and survival. 

It is clear to me that S510 has little to do with all of us as citizens. It treats us as consumers who need "experts" to protect us from what? What are we being protect from?  S510 is designed to protect us from the health consequences of the application of industrial techniques to the "production" of living plants and animals. To be clear, industrialization of food production is built on three principles: (1) standardization and the elimination of diversity, (2) concentration of production in larger and larger units to achieve the maximum efficiencies of scale, (3) the application of inputs (mostly from petroleum) to speed up and increase production. All three principles violate, outright, how Nature operates. One consequence of industrialization of food production is the growing problem with food safety.

Small farmers engaged in highly diverse plant and animal production, using natural inputs, and operating on principles that are captured in the 12 principles of Permaculture, essentially work and live in a different world from industrial agriculture. The degree of difference is so large that it almost appears that S510 is dealing with reality from another planet. But, of course, it isn't. 

So "what is going on" as I asked myself above. Here is what I believe.  
1. The closer a consumer is to the source of his/her food, the safer that food is with the safest food of all coming from farmers you know.
2. S510 seeks to impose a solution based on the same values that created the problem in the first place. S510, in part, is a good example of Amory Lovins's old observation about brute force. "If brute force isn't working, you aren't using enough of it." 
3. The best way to ensure food safety among small producers is to offer abundant, relevant, and respectful education on "good agricultural and food handling practices." Let farmers decide the best way to implement those good practices on their farms. Again, I don't know a single small producer selling directly to food customers that wouldn't  take reasonable measures to protect those customers. The Local Food Revolution is based on transparency, responsibility, and trust. 
4. In a world of increasingly scarce resources, he who controls food controls much. As someone who has witnessed personally the extreme lengths corporations will go to to "control" their market, their customers, and the risks they accept, I believe that underlying the food safety debate is another effort -- one to protect and extend the power of monopoly food corporations engaged in industrial agriculture. 

In 2007, four corporations controlled 84 percent of the beef packer market; four corporations controlled 66 percent of the pork packer market; four corporations controlled 59 percent of the broiler market. The turkey, flour milling, seed, and other agricultural markets are similarly concentrated. The number I like is, "85% of the food in USDA's School Lunch Commodity program comes from just 400 farms". S510 is about protecting and extending that monopoly.

This is place where I should write, "We are at a moment of fundamental choice about the design and direction of our food system(s)". We are at a moment of choice, but it isn't what we talk about on COMFOOD, much.

The industrial agricultural system is failing, failing fast. The rapidly growing ineffectiveness of herbicides and pesticides, the spread of new invasive species, climate change and the impact it has on rain, and the growing cost and instability of oil for an industrial system highly dependent on oil -- all these developments (and more) spell the end of industrial agriculture. The growing food safety problem is just another symptom of this system's failure.

The real choice we have is "Are we going to develop public policies that support the rapid spread of diverse, resilient local food systems less dependent on oil. Or, are we going to continue to prop up a failing industrial system with taxpayer subsidies and regulatory regimes like the one proposed by S510, until that system collapses?" And collapse it will. 

I work as hard as I can to make my family and my community more resilient, more able to deal with this coming food crisis. I write this email at 3:30am in the morning because so much of the rest of my day is filled with work I need to do. This is true for all farmers, from urban gardeners to 10,000 acre corn/bean producers. Most of us just don't have time to be as good citizens as we would like to be. We need reliable, transparent information to make decisions. 

I have written Sen. Stabenow twice about this issue. In response I have gotten an email version of robo-calling. I don't know what more I can do except express what I know and what I want to know here.

Anaiis, we have to find the focus and time to make the revolution you describe happen. But I don't know where either is to be found.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Chris Bedford
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No Joke Folks, the Food Safety Modernization Act will be voted on next week and will change local food production and access forever.

Some recent news clips to peruse for yourself:

Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance
Randy's Right
Christian Science Monitor
Franklin County Patriots
Triple Pundit
Main Street Insider

Does your head hurt yet? Yup, it's pretty compilcated. Here's a synopsis.

The Good:
Not much. Advocates say that due to all the contamination problems of late -- the spinach, the eggs, the peanuts [problems, uhm, that were created by Big Ag]  -- that WE the people need this legislation to protect us from ourselves. So what's wrong with that? Really, this bill is about corporate control of our food supply. More power will be handed to the FDA [yes, the same FDA that conducted RAIDS on raw milk farmers] with more food inspection rules and higher compliance costs not only for the big ag guys but also for the small family farms which will make it impossible for them to compete.

The Bad:
What was good about S.510 was the Tester-Hagan amendment, which exempted small scale farmers from burdensome provisions. But then the Big Ag guys, who vehemently argued that this bill was NOT about anti-competion, came out last week to protest this amendment. I know, it's shocking. Not.

The Very, Very Ugly:
Well I'm not the expert here but here is a quote from someone who is, and that kinda says it all:

"If accepted [S 510] would preclude the public’s right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes. It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God."

-Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistle blower

Don't take my word for it. Here are 12 reasons why S.510 is THE BILL FROM HELL.

Do something. Do it now. Call your Senators today. Tomorrow is too late.


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CITIZEN FOOD 10/25/2010
 
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Despite the efforts of many communities that are working hard to support local agriculture and improve nutrition standards, the majority of the food consumed in the USA is still highly processed, unhealthy and unsustainable. Mark Winne, the co-founder of Connecticut Food Policy Council, End Hunger Connecticut!, and the National Community Food Security Coalition and author of the recently published Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture talks about the myths of Big Agribusiness, the possible casualty of American democracy and how Food Citizenship can reclaim our dilapidated food system.
Industrial agriculture promises that it can feed the world.  Why don't you buy that?

The industrial food system means factory style production, high technology and is capital intensive and we have seen a tremendous amount of harm that's come from it. I mean, look at the growing resistance to antibiotics, look at the spread of genetically modified foods. We don't even really know if GMOs are safe or what could be the long term consequences of such crop production. We also can see the way the industrial food system operates. It’s very powerful, it's very well-heeled, and it has the best lobbyists in any state capital or at the Washington DC level. And it can pretty much control everything from labor practices to whether or not genetically modified food is accepted.

So what I’m saying is that the solution to feeding a hungry world doesn’t have to be about technology. It can be an engaged citizenry -- but you, the consumer, need to participate.

In the first chapter of your book called “A Food Story for Our Times,” you have created a rather grim vision of our food future, a la Pottersvillefrom It’s A Wonderful Life, which takes place in November 2020, just ten short years from now. The dairy industry has been nationalized, with a mega pipeline stretching across the country. All the soymilk is now produced by genetically modified growers and is sold by one big corporation called MongoPlant, and the Secretary of Agriculture has become the new authoritarian Food Czar. Can you really see this all happening in ten years or less?

I do think that kind of nightmarish scenario is possible. Things could reach such a crisis level that we unequivocally place all of our trust in the industrial food system, because we are frightened, because we are told there is not going to be enough food to go around, that there are far too many people. And climate change will have taken such a toll on our ability to produce food that we have to resort to more extreme technological measures.

The worst fear to me is that we may voluntarily forfeit control of our food because it’s easier and we may not feel we have an alternative because circumstances have become so dire. And the first casualty in all of that will be democracy. I am trying to make it clear to people who are in the alternative food system that while a lot of good things are happening, they are still pretty small measures. We shouldn’t be so sanguine, we are still barely at the margins.

You speak about an alternative food system, one that is based on self reliance. But there’s no profit in self reliance. This is America. Can this really work?

In the book I talk about self reliance and individualism, about Ralph Waldo Emerson as the champion of individualism. And I do think that's the other part of the story here. That is the antidote. Hundreds of thousands of people over the last 10 or 20 years have gotten into all manner of alternative food work.  And whether you're a small organic farmer or you've created something like Stonyfield Yogurt – and you know, Stonyfield’s initial investment came from an order of nuns who made a socially responsible loan with a very low interest rate to Stonyfield, which launched the whole the Stonyfield enterprise - I think that it all has its roots in American individualism and self-reliance. And much of that has been profitable.

What does it mean to be a Food Citizen?

I often say that your hands are in the soil, your vegetables are on the cutting board and your voice is down at city hall. That is my little mantra. I use this term, “getting your heads above the plate” – at some point, we need to get our heads above the plate, meaning that we also need to start to become good food citizens. That means being aware of the political, environmental and economic issues of food. It gets pretty complicated and you might end up having indigestion. But what's more important here is that we start to challenge each other more about all of those things. Shifting from food consumer to food citizen is an educational process, it’s about becoming more aware of these issues and then beginning to actually participate.

What about the idea of Food Citizenry as a force for community development? What steps can a community take to encourage more conscious food consumption?

I recommend two basic actions here: one is simple food production, whether its backyard gardening or community gardening, to broadening that out to a larger kind of commercial food production venture in our communities. And the second thing is education - we have to provide more educational opportunities in growing our own food. There is an excellent educational nutrition kitchen program in Austin, Texas that I talk about in the book called the Happy Kitchen which focuses on cooking and food purchasing and provides a good model to follow. Growing healthy local food also needs to be part of the public school curriculum. I think those are things that people can do. And they are doing them. We just need more.

You co-founded the Connecticut Food Policy Council back when no one knew what a food policy council was. What about today - are food policy councils on the rise?

It’s been huge lately. There are over 100 food policy councils in this country and especially in the last three to five years there has been a soaring demand for them. There are a couple of reasons for this: one is this huge new wave of interest in food that is taking over this country. And then with the last Farm Bill, there was this unprecedented interest in a much wider range of food and agriculture issues, and people who had not been interested in public policy work before came to see that there was a connection between food, health, agriculture and government. And so now with a food policy council - I think this is a perfect representation of a democratic institution at a local and state level where people and representatives of the food system can come together, where we can have open and transparent discussions about what’s going on and what the needs are and we can act accordingly. This allows all of us, as Food Citizens, to be involved, on the ground, in an ombudsman role.

What makes for an effective food policy council?

Number one, it needs to represent a wide variety of food interests and involve many sectors of the community. Secondly, it’s critical that it does actually influence policy, and that is has done things over time from research to public education to getting laws passed, to being able to influence the size of government budgets as they effect food, to simply putting food on the agenda. And that’s where food policy councils have been enormously effective -- they have taken food and brought it before city councils, brought it before state legislators, before department heads in government and made them pay attention to the role that government can play in influencing the quality, the price, the availability of food. So that is what defines a successful food policy council. It’s fairly aggressive and it is representative of a broad number of food systems interests, it has a vision, but it has a practical way to implement that vision. It’s not starry eyed.

Where have you seen food policy councils have an impact of late?

The New Haven Food Policy Council was instrumental in getting the school food service to go private and independent, and bring in Tim Cipriano, who is now the new executive food service director of New Haven Public Schools. That was one of the more significant wins from a food policy council. It’s all part of the task of keeping food on the public agenda. I also advise food policy councils to just let your elected officials know all the time what your position is on the current issues so that every time something comes up, your position is out there. Take the recent salmonella poisoning in eggs – what should your community food policy council say about that? Maybe we can say the industrial food system and government regulation has failed and we probably should be looking for ways to support local agriculture. Or let’s look at our own health inspections in our city and in our state and see whether or not they are adequate. There are things happening in our food system all the time, big ticket items and the little things. I encourage the food policy councils to create a body of knowledge, a whole string of documentation of what their positions are, what their interests are and keep that in front of their policy makers, and when possible make it available to the public at large.

Click on the links to read an excerpt of Mark’s latest book, Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture or his last book, Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty.

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image from Adventures among Ants by Mark W. Moffett, published in 2010 by the University of California Press

 

Leafcutter ants engage in monoculture practices just like we do but with much stricter public health and safety guidelines that would put our own National Organic Program standards to shame. What do these ants know that we don’t? I spoke to Mark Moffett, Research Associate in Entomology at the Smithsonian Institute and author of Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions to find out.

So there are meat eating ants and vegetarian ants? Would you say meat eater ants are more aggressive than the vegetarian Leafcutters?

If you look around they probably do have battles amongst themselves but leafcutters don’t have to compete as much as carnivorous ants – carnivorous ants are all competing over the same things and have a lot of battles going on. The Leafcutter ants basically only have to compete with a few things like caterpillars and they do not have to carry on a content battle but it’s true the ants societies, once they get really big, like human societies, once we got very big, we got very good at warfare cause we end up what a huge labor force that will do whatever needs to be done.

So some ants cultivate livestock like we do?

Some ants have animal husbandry, and can actually have domesticated animals like the Herdsman ants of Southeast Asia that actually have herds of little aphids that only live with them, and the ants guard them during the day. They get their carbohydrates by drinking their sweet nectar that they produce.

If leafcutter ants are vegetarian, then why did they attack you and carve out deep grooves in your flesh?

All ants are very nationalistic, they are absolutely devoted to their societies to a degree that humans would find unbelievable - even the most ardent American would have trouble matching ants. Ants are willing to die for their society at a moment’s notice, and so the situation when that happens are when people like me decide to shovel into their nest which is a big no-no, and vegetarian or not, they will defend and they will not eat me but they will certainly carve me up. I haven’t stuck around long enough to find out if they will ingest me but they will definitely carve me up.

You had an ant encounter in Ecuador that signified for you the very origin of agriculture – can you tell us about that?

I was on the shores of the Napo river in Ecuador, which is an enormous tributary of the Amazon, watching two enormous streams of ants flowing by, one on either side of me. One was a swarm of army ants, which are highly predatory, taking back to their camp all kinds of pray like scorpions and spiders. On the other side of me was a column of the leafcutter ants, which are entirely agricultural -- they don’t eat any meat. This made me reflect on the fact that these are the two dominant groups of ants in the American tropics, each of which can have colonies in the millions, extremely successful, huge societies but with a completely different way of organizing their lives. Humans have shown the same kind of extremes over history, from nomadic herdsman to sedentary agriculture people. These ants have the same thing going on -- the predatory army ants tend to be nomadic, they shift around a lot; while the leafcutters have huge well-set cities with complicated layouts to raise their crops. Most of us don’t think of the leafcutters as being agricultural because they are carrying leaves that they get from nature, but as it turns out they use these leaves to grow their crops.

And this crop would be…?

Fungus. They grow fungus, they are mushroom-loving ants…the modern leafcutter ants raise this fungus and are entirely dependent on it.

What does this fungus look like?

They turn the leaves into a mulch, it’s very soft stuff. A fungal garden can be the size of a human brain and about the same color, a sort of a gray cast with microscopic apple-like growths merging by the many thousands into a uniform gray fuzz that only the ants appreciate as food. The fungus has all the nutrients they require.

What is so special about the fungus?

The fungus creates enough amino acids for these ants to get a balanced diet, and if they ate only leaves they would probably starve but the fungus amps up the nutrients so they can survive.

How many fungi does one colony need?

The number of ants in these colonies can go up to a few million, and they can have thousands of these chambers with these gardens in them going down 20 or even 30 feet into the ground. That’s a lot of ant miles. One colony’s worth of fungal gardens can weigh hundreds of pounds. They are huge monocultures, and the ants have domesticated this fungus so thoroughly that it cannot live in the wild.

This sounds like a large scale operation – do you consider this industrial farming?

Yes, this would be industrial farming. The earliest of these agricultural ants, before the leafcutters came along, would raise the fungi on manure. They had very simple, small societies. Their crops were healthy, they didn’t have disease problems, but they couldn’t grow them on a large scale. So the modern leafcutters, once they domesticated their crops 12 million years ago, could explode their populations into the millions much like humans did after we similarly invented mass agriculture. But like us the ants now have to constantly manage every aspect of their crops. The modern ants have a complete assembly line up the standards of Henry Ford, all these different sized ants in a colony do different things, some of them weed, some of them plant the new fungi, some feed the young. There is a whole assembly line as well in cutting the leaves, taking them back to the nest, chopping them, turning them into a mulch, adding them to the gardens, keeping the gardens healthy, replanting the gardens and then removing their waste. Everyone is doing a different task, it’s very, very organized, and it’s definitely like a factory.

But if they engage in industrial farming practices as we do, they must have similar industrial farming problems?

That’s why ants use pesticides -- they grow some from their bodies, but they also grow a type of bacteria related to the penicillin bacteria that they then apply to their gardens. It knocks out the major diseases. The ant workers are moving pesticides around all the time.

So these pesticides are environmentally friendly?

They seem to have gotten a pretty biodegradable, healthy pesticide choice going on there.

With all the fungal gardens and the ants and the traffic, would you say these colonies suffer from a good degree of air pollution?

The huge colonies have to manage the airflow just right to get enough oxygen down to their gardens. Aboveground they end up with these huge turrets -- you walk into a rain forest and see these nests can be enormous, covering an area half the size of a tennis court with these turrets around their perimeters. If you put your face up to a turret, you can feel the hot air coming out. The ants actually organize the corridors down beneath the ground so that the hot air goes out of those exterior turrets, drawing cool air through the gardens to keeps everything cool and fresh.

So ants have been cultivating their own food for 50 millions of years, long before us, and they are surviving heartily today…what’s their secret?

If we compare ourselves to the ants, in terms of managing our environment and health – well, let me just say that if ants were in charge, there would be no giant oil spill off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The ants put a lot of effort into making sure their environment is very healthy in every way. I suspect their investment in environmental safety is ten times what humans put out. Of course we humans are just figuring out how critical public health issues are. So this is a word to the wise from nature: given similar problems and conditions, the ants have evolved a much more serious ability to deal with environmental issues at their small scale than we have at ours. The gardens are precisely regulated, their temperature, the humidity, any weedy things that enter in to their system are removed instantly, any diseases are micromanaged. They do things that might be impractical for us, putting their gardens into hundreds of separate chambers so if any one of them has a problem the ants can cordon it off, and keep it separate from the rest of their society. Everything about their organization has a redundant fail safe to it.

You have said that humans are only recently learning the value of "green" investments that “have been the common currency of ants for millennia." What should we know about these green investments?

Relative to their size, ants invest a huge amount in public health and safety, much more than humans do, especially these ants with their gardens. They have to be very cautious with big monocultures, as much as we do to protect ourselves from the next potato blight.  Because what has happened with these ants is they have bred their cultivars so thoroughly that they have lost a lot of their genetic diversity, much as we have done with our modern crops, which means both our crops and theirs are very susceptible to disease. As a result the ants have to be very meticulous. They sow their crops, they weed them, they cull them, they manage their waste, they treat them with pesticides, they do everything a human farmer would do but often with far more care, particularly in terms of health issues. They have sanitation squads that remove every trace of a foreign weedy fungus from their gardens, including diseases, and isolate them in deep underground chambers used only for waste. And the workers that live in those chambers aren’t allowed to come back into regular society; they are full time waste managers doing a very dangerous job. Those chambers are the deepest in the ant colony, and can be a big enough that even a human could fit in one. You can only imagine how many centuries of ant hours are required to dig a chamber that huge, that far under ground by these little ants…

We have to start taking the health issues of crops and the environment more seriously. Ants have made more of it than we do, and they have survived in stable way with their crops for 50 million years. Humans are still in an up and down cycle, where food becomes scarce one year and adequate the next. We are still working out the kinks…through it all, ants have invested a lot more energy and time into their food in their daily lives than we humans do. We tend to take food for granted.
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When Michelle Obama launched her Let’s Move Campaign this past February to find “grassroots” solutions to end childhood obesity and make access to healthy food more affordable, she said “if we build it, they will come.” Well the people at the Plow to Plate®  program at New Milford Hospital in Connecticut have already built it, and they are definitely coming – in droves.

“You can’t get more grassroots than us,” says Marydale Debor, Vice President of New Milford Hospital and Coalition Coordinator and co-founder of Plow to Plate®. “We created this program at my kitchen table!”

And now she wants to see this grassroots program really take root and go nationwide.

In the name of public health and good food, the New Milford Hospital, thanks to three determined women -- Chef Anne Gallagher [now Coordinating Chef], Dr. Diane D'isidori [Pediatrician and Medical Advisor] and Marydale -- abandoned its old bad food habits and started anew with the Boston-based vendor Unidine. That was almost three years ago. Now the hospital is creating meals made from scratch from food that is grown on neighboring farms. And it clicked. Patients loved it. Doctors loved it. Now people come from all around town just to dine in the hospital dining hall. Since then, Plow to Plate® launched its own CSA program for employees, created a healing culinary maintained by hospital volunteers and launched a senior social dinners program and a farmers market. Plus they have launched a ten-month comprehensive Youth Chef Advocacy Program, where kids master the full spectrum of skills from planting the food to cooking it, preparing it and advocating for it.  Plow to Plate® has received local, state and national awards, including the 2009 Planetree Award for Nutrition and Nurturing Aspects of Food and the 2009 Glynwood Harvest Award for Good Food for Health.

Marydale believes very passionately that this type of program, starting from the hospital, branching out into the community, is the kind of model that could and will work nationwide and she wants other hospitals to follow their lead.  She spoke with me on the phone this week to tell me about her passion for this program and what she sees in the future.

Q: Plow to Plate® is many things to many people and is a quite comprehensive program. But if you had to describe what it means to you, what would you say?

A: It’s taking food as absolutely fundamental, as all the things we associate with food, family, friends, the social fabric of a community, environmentalism, food at the center of human well being. We’ve lost this in our society, this is so fundamental to health, and we are never going to deal with all the health problems in this country unless we get back basics, back to healthy food and diet. We are actually making people sick today. It was a lot of heavy lifting to get our food fixed. And we did a lot of things at once and now our whole community, everywhere you go, from the post office, everyone eats here. It’s good public policy. Is it a science? No, it’s basic common sense. We have to get back to more simple intervention solutions to fix this whole problem of diet in this country.

Q: But where do you start?

A: We can help other communities change. Top line, it’s how to change a community mindset and practice a full force endeavor. You start with a hospital and you lead by example -- and change the fundamental food system. And then you start adding on programs, you bring on the seniors, you start addressing the kids, you grow the program, and the next thing you know is you’re doing a farmers market too. You find every opportunity to promote healthy foods and healthy lives. We’re like a SWAT team, we go into a community and say we are not going to let any opportunity go by to change the way people relate to food and what kind of food people eat. It’s about community transformation.

Q: What makes your Youth Chef Advocacy program special?

A: This is a very focused program. We work with them from March through December, which is the crop calendar and what we are teaching them is the intersection of environment, healthy food and health. We have field trips to see farmers and see the work being done and how healthy foods are grown and why that is important.  Then that is mixed with very high culinary skills, the kids are really trained as chefs, they get the training you would get at any culinary school. This program has so many dimensions to it and has been so effective. The kids embark upon advocacy projects, we seek to cultivate kids to influence peers and influence public policy. This is the hot ticket item, the kids get so excited, they say wow, I got into the Chef program! Kid advocates can really make an impact, and it’s going to be just like the tobacco issue, so we are taking some of those lessons learned and are now applying them to public health.

Q: Are other hospitals doing this?

A: No other hospital is following in our footsteps, not on this scale, believe me, I never even knew it would get this big. I was like, let’s just follow our hearts and see what happens. We, the hospital, we have the bully pulpit, we are the healthcare provider and we are saying we are not serving bad food anymore. Other hospitals are changing their food but they aren’t doing the multi-faceted approach. Many try but they are dependent on their food service vendors and that’s a whole other thing, getting them to come in line with how they source food. Then you get into the supply chain and you are working up the industrial agriculture food line. That’s where the rubber hits the road. That’s why we have to change that farm bill and get rid of that commodity subsidy and give that subsidy to small farmers who are going to grow good food. At some point programs like mine are only going to be at the margin. We’ve got to go to federal policy if we want to fix this problem. But we’ve done a good job, Diane, Anne and I. We have done an amazing job by never taking no for an answer, it’s always about: how can we do this, how can we make this happen? It’s hard sometimes but we see the results and it’s so incredible.
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Plowing Ahead, The Working Lands Alliance conference this past Saturday at Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies’ Kroon Hall, was both enlightening and sobering. WLA has spent the past 10 years or so working to preserve Connecticut’s rapidly depleting farmland, and a group of very passionate farmers, conservationists, town officials, anti-hunger advocates, locavores, chefs, and a wayward blogger [me] had gathered to examine the past ten years of progress, or un-progress, as was sometimes the case. Depending on who you listen to, the annual rate of farmland loss in Connecticut ranges from 1,883 acres [UCONN] to a breathtaking high of 9567 acres [USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service]. And 85% of CT’s farmland remains unprotected.

USDA'sDeputySecretary Kathleen Merrigan arrived to give the keynote and CT Representative Rosa DeLauro was there to introduce her. They had just come from a dairy farm that morning where, as Merrigan said, the milk prices were still not “where we want them to be.” But when Merrigan took to the podium, she rallied the crowd by announcing that “WLA and the American Farmland Trust has bucked the national trend and has grown small farms by leaps and bounds!” 90% of CT farmland still remains in the hands of small family farms, which average around 100 acres. That’s the good news. The bad news is that anyone wanting to break into this business needs to have deep pockets. The average start up cost of a farm today, including land cost and equipment, in Connecticut is $950K.  Yup folks, that’s almost a million dollars. Pretty much a million. So let’s just call it The Million Dollar Tractor Dream, sort of like a wet dream for Young Agriculturalists, the farm life ending prematurely before it begins.

Who can afford that? Especially a student coming out of some sustainable agriculture program with loans already higher than a corn stalk. While food access plays a major role when devising new USDA strategies and revising existing frameworks, land access and capital costs seem to be the barrier that trumps all. Luckily, a CT Dept of Agriculture program called Connecticut Farmland Link is in place and works to connect existing landowners with the next generation of farmers. Merrigan says that while they do not have a grant program yet in place for new farmers, they will soon. That’s a good thing cause as we were leaving the conference, WLA Chair Terry Jones from the Jones Family Farm leaned over to tell me that CT’s always forward thinking Senate Democrats has proposed to raid $5 million from the Community Investment Act [Governor Rell’s original proposal was $12m.] This fund had been created expressly to provide financial support to the CT Department of Agriculture for farmland preservation as well as for that Farmland Link program.So it sounds like the USDA grant program that Merrigan and crew will be coming up with is going to be needed sooner than later. Can’t wait to hear more about it.
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My recent article posted on CIVIL EATS on school lunch reform offers perspectives from leaders in the school lunch reform movement on how an increase in school lunch funding could impact our agricultural landscape.

Ann Cooper, Renegade Lunch Lady and founder of Lunchbox.org and her work with schools and farms from New York to California is the evidence needed to show that local farms can be saved by school food reform:

"When I was in both New York and in California, the farmers would tell me that we had saved their farms. Cause we will buy seconds, we will buy stuff when they have too much of it, and we can buy early season before the farmers markets start up and we can buy in real big quantities, we could take a couple tons of potatoes. So it’s the relationship with small and medium size farmers that schools could really have a tremendous impact on."

And Tony Geraci, Director of Food and Nutrition at the Baltimore City Public Schools makes a stark point about the need for school food reform and the ever looming debt that burdens this country:
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"Do I think the school lunch program is underfunded, absolutely. The trillions of dollars that we have given away in corporate bailouts, I tell the folks in Washington DC that it behooves us to invest in our kids to keep them healthy and alive just to pay off the debt if for no other reason, just to make business sense. If you put economists in a room they would agree with me, 1 in 3 kids born after the year in 2000 are going to get diabetes type 2, 1 in 2 African American kids will get it, that is staggering, we can’t keep pumping them full of fat and sugar and expect it to go away. Any upfront costs incurred are wiped out on the back end by not treating the disease. Why don’t these kids have more value to us? I tell people, who is going to pay all this debt off? If for no other reason than just basic economics, let’s just keep healthy and strong, let’s keep them alive long enough to pay back this debt."
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