Dirty Secrets

Geomorphologist David Montgomery has spent decades studying erosion. Here he discusses why we should be worried about the state of the dirt under our feet.

I’m sure I disappointed my mother. She dreamed of a daughter who wore high heels, stockings, and the other accoutrements of a big-city woman. Instead she got me, a woman who lives in sneakers or workboots, Sorels or barns boots, depending on the weather. My footwear might not cut it with the well-heeled class, but it works for what I need it to do. For example, I spend much of the year walking our pasture and kicking poo piles apart. Definitely not what those 5th-Avenue types would do, but truth be told, this isn’t drudgery or some kind of failure for me. I love seeing manure in the fields, and I find the kicking ritual to be quite fulfilling. OK, perhaps my love of flying manure is a bit odd, but there’s a reason I’m so into it: I know, as a I land a good square blow to a pile, that I’m feeding the soil, and the soil, along with sun and water, are really the things that feed all of us.

This is a long way of saying that I was hooked when I started reading David Montgomery’s book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. I immediately sensed someone who would appreciate manure kicking as a past time, when I read the first page. “Normally we don’t think too much about the ground that supports our feet, houses, cities, and farms,” David begins. “Yet even if we usually take it for granted, we know that good soil is not just dirt. When you dig into rich, fresh earth, you can feel the life in it. Fertile soil crumbles and slides right off the shovel. Look closely and you find a whole world of life eating life, a biological orgy of recycling the dead back into new life. Healthy soil has an enticing and wholesome aroma—the smell of life itself.”

David is a geologist by training (with a Ph.D. in geomorphology from Berkeley) and a professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. He is also the author of King of Fish; The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon, and a recipient of one of the twenty-five, 2008 MacAurthur Fellowships (aka: the “Genius” grants) awarded each year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

I ask David how he got into making connections of eroding soils to eroding societies, since geomorphologists usually study the broader impacts of erosion on landforms, rather than on life forms? Was he a gardener or a farmer? “Oh no, I have a brown thumb!” he tells me with a hearty laugh. “But my wife is a major organic gardener, so I have gotten more into seeing soil through her eyes, as something that is biologically alive.”  He also tells me that as a sophomore in college, he read a book called Topsoil and Civilization. “ It was written in the 1950s, and is long out of print, but when I read it, the argument that soils are fundamental to the longevity of societies, made quite an impression on me. Then, the more I got into this field, and the more of the world I saw, the more the idea that progressive, long-term, and slow soil loss is a real hazard is something that resonated very deeply with me.

“Writing Dirt was my attempt to bring this issue back into public discourse. As I worked on it, I realized how powerful, and strong, and correct the story was, so I became more and more motivated to try and make this issue relevant for people today. I want people to think about it, and talk about, and do something about it.”

Dirt jumps across geologic time and space, and makes the argument that how societies fare in the long run depends on how they treat their soils. Simple. Concise. You are your dirt.

Through the pages of Dirt, David steers us along a course with many stops. He takes us to some of the earliest human settlements around the Fertile Crescent, to the world of the Phoenicians, and the early Egyptians, and on to the hey day of the Romans and the Greeks. Through stops in different centuries, and different regions of the world,  we see the same thing: eroding soil erodes societies. But David’s lens doesn’t look simply at the past. He also reflects upon how the same thing is happening today, from the Amazonian rainforest, and the African Sahel, to the Midwest and the Palouse region of Eastern Washington.

We talk about the Palouse. “The Palouse has lost something like half its topsoil, eroded off in just the last century,” he tells me. “That is not a very good track record to a geologist: a hundred years is like a blink in geological terms, so if that is what it takes to get rid of the rest of the topsoil, that is going to come frighteningly soon! We will be dead, but still it is frighteningly soon, because it is not that many generations away. Kids being born today may be alive in one hundred years, and their kids are going to squarely inherit the soil that can feed them, or the infertile subsoil that won’t.”

The intergenerational concept is one that David comes back to, time and again, in the book and in our discussion. Early in the book, he says, “Given that the state of the soil determines what can be grown for how long, preserving the basis for the wealth of future generations requires intergenerational land stewardship. So far, however, few human societies have produced cultures founded on sustaining the soil, even though most discovered ways to enhance soil fertility. Many exhausted their land at a rate commensurate with their level of technological sophistication.”

What about us? We have the value of hindsight, but we still have seen half the soil in the Palouse go away. And, we still lose “millions of tons of topsoil annually from farmers’ fields in the Mississippi River Basin. Every second, North America’s largest river carries another dump truck’s load of topsoil to the Carribbean. Each year, America’s farms shed enough soil to fill a pickup truck for every family in the country.”

As David says in the book, right after informing readers about this loss: “This is a phenomenal amount of dirt.”

I ask David, what can we do? What would he do if he were dirt czar and could define our actions to protect our soil?

“The first thing I would point out is that we have a real opportunity. Our actions could help solve several problems at the same time, because the more we reinvest and put organic matter back into our agricultural soils, the more we can sequester carbon, and that also contributes to fixing the global warming problem while it insures soil fertility over the long run. So it really is a win-win situation.

“Secondly, I believe we can easily make the case that we live on a planet where the population is increasing rapidly, and that pretty much all the places where agriculture can be sustainably practiced are already under production. So further losses of either topsoil or agricultural land are—in a sense—trading off whatever benefit people get from soil- and land-wasting practices now, against the ability to feed people later.”

He pauses for second, as if to gather his thoughts, and then says, “We essentially need another agricultural revolution, reinvesting in life in the soil, rather than simply using soil as a substrate to prop up crops while we apply the nutrients—made from petrochemicals—that will make them grow. If we encourage life and the biotic cycling of nutrients in the soil, which is the essence of natural soil fertility, then we can generate an agriculture that will be sustainable in a post-petroleum world.”

David points to a number of specific practices, but highlights that practices need to be appropriate for the landscape and the society. No-till farming could improve soil retention on the larger farms of the Midwest; labor-intensive urban agriculture (which has far higher yields per acre than industrial agriculture) could supply food in most cities. Institutional composting, instead of land-filling organic waste, could help return nutrients and organic matter to soil. And concepts such as biochar, based on an ancient Amazonian approach to burning charcoal from overstory vegetation and then returning it to small, permanently and intensively farmed fields, could be applied in places like the rainforest. Each approach has to be adapted to the climate, the landform, and the local economy, but through these, we could indeed feed the population.

David’s final words in the book resonate with me: “As odd as it may sound, civilization’s survival depends on treating soil as an investment, as a valuable inheritance rather than a commodity—as something other than dirt.” So mom, you will have to excuse me: I have to go kick some piles of organic matter around the pasture. The future depends on it.

Antibiotics with your veggies?

My friend Christine Heinrichs, author of How to Raise Poultry, sent me a note the other day about a study she saw in Environmental Health News that reports on new research that shows we are not only exposed to antibiotics in meat, but also from ingesting vegetables, even ones grown on organic farms, if the vegetables were grown on land where manure from animals treated with antibiotics was applied to the soil. Yikes! This is just scary in a time of antibiotic resistant super bugs.

Thanks to Christine for the head’s up, and the article’s author, Matthew Cimitile, for getting the word out about this issue!

It’s Official. CNN says so!

CNN has run an article on farm fresh food. It’s a growing trend, they say.

I sometimes wonder where the mainstream media is. Have they been living in a cave in DC, or New York, or Atlanta?

In an article on CNN.com today (here) they call the locavore movement, “the so-called localvore movement.” Come on guys: it is locavore! And it isn’t so-called. It is! People in all corners of the country are conscious of where their food comes from. They might not commit one hundred percent to eating a hundred-mile diet, but they do make an effort to buy at least some local food. They go to farmers’ markets. They join CSAs. They mindfully select local produce in their grocery store when it is available seasonally. So CNN, get with it. This is a movement that has been evolving for thirty years. WalMart has figured it out. Safeway has figured it out. You need to quit acting surprised by it!

Meat, A Love Story

The average North American consumes 260 pounds of meat per year. In Meat: A Love Story, Canadian business journalist, Susan Bourette, looks at our cultural connection to animal protein. We have been eating meat since our home was in a cave, and “our culture flourished around the campfire.” But in recent times, our meat consumption has been accompanied by a super-sized helping of guilt. As Susan says in the book’s introduction, “The sin, the immorality of meat-eating, has been the overriding leitmotif of the past few decades, ever since the first pot-smoking, bead-loving longhairs hijacked the debate and determined what the nation should have for dinner. Still, it gnawed. Deep in our guts, we knew Homer Simpson was right when he told his meat-eschewing daughter on the way to a neighborhood barbecue, ‘Lisa, you don’t win friends with salad.’

Susan was not a food writer, nor someone with a particular interest in food and farming, but through an assignment for the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, she found herself going undercover to learn more about the meat-packing industry: “There had already been a great deal of consolidation in the U.S. meat-packing industry,” she tells me, “and it was beginning to happen more and more in Canada. In the Canadian media there was frequent mention of one new state-of-the-art packing plant, but it seemed they couldn’t find and keep employees. That got me wondering, ‘how bad could this job be?’

Susan found out quickly how bad the job could be. “Meat disassembly is the most dangerous job in North America. I learned about just how desperate people can be for work.”

The job, now largely done by recent immigrants and undocumented workers, also taught Susan that the industrial plant, processing thousands of animals per hour, is disturbing on so many levels — from the way the employees are treated, to the way the animals are treated, and to the poor quality of the product that leaves the plant. “I walked out saying I would never eat meat again,” Susan says.

But never eating meat again didn’t last long. After just a few weeks back in her regular life, she realized that ”the experience had me giving up something I really love. Like a lot of people in North America, I took meat for granted, so this experience really got me thinking deeply about what we are doing when we eat meat. Meat is more than just protein, more than just a lifeless chain of amino acids. So, I set out to find out why we are obsessed with meat, and to find meat I could eat with a clear conscious.”

That journey of understanding took Susan north of the Arctic Circle to a whale-hunting Inuit village, where the hunt “is so elemental, but is also a celebration of the gift and the culture, too.” It also took her to Cajun Louisiana where she experienced people who relish food with an amazing cultural vibrancy unlike anything she’d previously experience. “People were cooking jambalaya out on the streets and there was such joyousness around the food and their sharing.” She spent time in an up-scale New York City butcher shop where the traditional skills of the butcher are kept alive, in the kitchens of celebrity chefs, and in the halls of bureaucrats, where she learned about the failures of our food policy to protect consumers. She captured the journey in a highly-readable, often funny, and sometimes very scary book.

Susan and I chatted in October 2008, with elections in both the United States and Canada imminent, and economic turmoil dominating the world’s news. Many economists point to too much deregulation of the banking and investment systems as one of the causes of the turmoil, so that led to our discussion of how “big meat” has come to control so much of the marketplace, and how it too has become far too deregulated.

“Big meat has won on so many counts in terms of trying to get the system ever more deregulated,” Susan explains. “The kind of deregulation we are seeing has resulted in these incredible meat recalls. Last year was the worst year for meat safety in the United States. People die from E. coli and listeria; the inspectors I talked to are completely demoralized.”

I asked her, “Why can’t the inspectors do something about it?”

“First of all, the pace of production is truly mind boggling,” she said. “The inspectors can’t keep up with it, just like the workers can’t keep up with the pace of disassembly.”

In fact, according to the book, there are about 7,500 meat inspectors, which may seem like a lot, but they are supposed to inspect over 88 billion pounds of meat. By my calculations, that means that each inspector is inspecting about 12 million pounds of meat per year, or almost 6,000 pounds per hour. No wonder there’s a problem.

If that isn’t enough to worry you, Susan writes that lobbying efforts reclassified feces from a dangerous contaminant to a ‘cosmetic blemish.’ One former inspector, David Carney, who she interviewed in the book provided a succinct summary: ‘We used to trim the shit off the meat. Then we washed the shit off the meat. Now the consumer eats the shit off the meat.’

When we talked, Susan said that during her research she had heard of inspectors who wanted to shut down the line at Nebraska Beef in 2002. Instead of gaining support in their effort to protect our food system, these employees were overruled and reprimanded. Maybe someone should have listened: In 2008 Nebraska Beef had to recall million pounds of burger due to two different multi-state E. coli outbreaks that sickened dozens of people and caused at least one death.

In spite of the problems and challenges of big meat, Susan found the positive side of our meat culture, with more growers and small-processors teaming up to bring meat to our tables that isn’t cruel, polluting, and disease laden.

“I think people are waking up,” she told me. “There is a renaissance in meat eating. Meat lovers can eat their favorite protein with a clear conscious, and not have to worry about pathogens, animals raised in abysmal conditions, or terrible environmental impacts. Something fundamental is shifting.”

That is, undoubtedly, good news for all of us who love meat, and for all of us who raise meat animals.

Why Grassfed is Best

Jo Robinson has spent years studying the nutritional benefits of grassfed meat. Here she shares some of her findings.

Jo Robinson isn’t a farmer, yet she’s become one of the leading voices in discussions about why grassfed is best (the title of her first booklet on the benefits of grassfed meat). An investigative journalist and author who has specialized in writing about health and nutrition for several decades, Jo credits her grandmother as the guiding light that set her on the path of writing about nutrition.

“I had the great good fortune of having a grandmother who was seriously interested in nutrition,” she says as we begin our discussion. “She was a follower of Adelle Davis, the author and pioneer of natural nutrition—or eating whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, and unprocessed foods—during the 1940s through the 1960s. Even though I loved Wonder bread as a kid, my grandmother made us whole wheat bread, and made sure that we knew that white bread just wasn’t that good for you.”

Today Jo lives on Vashon Island in Washington State. She gardens (her next book project is on modern plants that come close to the higher nutritional value of wild plants) and she continues to write about nutritional research and how our eating choices affect our health. She is the author of Pasture Perfect, a book that explores “the far-reaching benefits of choosing meat, eggs, and dairy products from grass-fed animals,” and she operates eatwild.com, a website that gets over a million visitors each year who want to learn more about grassfed food, and that links grassfed producers and marketers (such as restaurants and food coops that highlight grassfed products) with consumers seeking their products. (Not only can grassfed producers register at eatwild.com to help market their products, but they can also take advantage of the other resources on the site, such as Jo’s research database and essays, as tools to help educate consumers about the benefits of their products.)

The Omega Connection

In 1985, Jo began researching the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids (omega-3s). At the time, there was little available literature on the omega-3s—a group of good fats that are produced in the leaves of green plants (including algae see footnote), but the research that was available suggested that the omega-3s provided a host of health benefits, including improved heart health.

One day while researching omega-3s, Jo came across an intriguing study. It found that animals in the wild had much higher levels of omega-3s than farm-raised animals, because they are browsers that eat mainly grasses and bush. Not long after, she read that meat from farm animals raised on pasture and grass had values of omega-3s that were very close to wild meat. She followed that thread, and spent much of the next decade continuing to research the topic–though it wasn’t easy.

“It took me years to research all the benefits of grassfed meat, dairy products, and eggs” Jo says, “because at that time there was very little research in the United States. We had totally committed our national agriculture to confined, grain-fed animal production, so that’s what all the research was on. I had to go back to studies done in the prior to the 1970s in the U.S. research literature, and to European and New Zealand studies for more modern research. But, gradually I pieced together all these studies, and discovered that grassfed was better for the health of the animals, better for the health of consumers, better for the environment, and better for the farmers, partly because they could earn more money marketing directly to consumers. Grassfed is small and local—there aren’t any grass-based megafarms—so you are feeding local economies when you eat grassfed.”

As her research continued, Jo discovered that grassfed animals didn’t just benefit from higher levels of omega-3s (two to five times higher than in animals raised in confinement and fed largely grain-based diets). They also boasted higher levels of other beneficial nutrients: Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), another good fat, is also two to five times higher in grassfed meat and dairy products than in those from grain-fed animals. Antioxidants (the nutrients that help fight the free radicals that attack our cells, leading to cancer and other ailments) are ten to fifty times higher. And grassfed products contain significantly higher amounts of vitamins, minerals, calcium, and even dietary fiber.

Speaking Out

By the late 1990s, Jo had gathered lots of research about the nutritional benefits of grassfed products, and she shared what she was learning with Allan Nation, the owner of a newspaper called “The Stockman Grassfarmer” who knew a lot about raising cattle on pasture. He asked her to speak at his next national conference.

“I couldn’t believe the reception I got at the conference,” she says. “I’m not a farmer, and I had not dealt with farmers. I thought they might be critical of what I was doing, but there was actually a stampede for the little booklet I brought with me, Why Grassfed is Best. From that point on, I was invited to speak at more places, and that spurred me to keep doing more and more research, and to help spread the word. I started eatwild.com in 2001, and never looked back.”

Jo wrote Pasture Perfect in 2004, as a book mainly geared toward consumers who wanted to learn more about the benefits of grassfed meat, dairy, and eggs. In it she talked about mad cow disease, saying “It wasn’t the cows that were mad—it was the cattle industry.” I asked Jo to elaborate on how animal agriculture has become mad.

“Our production system presumes that you can treat animals anyway you want and you can feed them anything you want to, as long as they don’t get obviously sick or die. We don’t care what’s in the meat when it’s all said and done. We have the attitude that meat is meat is meat, eggs are eggs are eggs… even some prominent dietitians still say that there is no difference in the end product regardless of how the animals were raised. But there is a huge difference, nutritionally, depending on how you treat the animals and what you feed them.

“It is absurd, that we think we can treat animals as if they are machines and not pay any attention to their well-being. What I’ve found studying the scientific literature is so disgusting that people rarely believe me when I first tell them about it. For example, there was a study of how much manure lambs will eat before they refuse it, and the researchers got them eating up to 60% of their diet as dried manure. Then there was the great bubblegum study (funded by a gum manufacturer looking for a way to dispose of out-of-date gum): they fed dairy cows stale gum in its aluminum wrappers, all chopped up in their feed. I can point to another study where they figured out just how many pot scrubbers to feed grain-fed cattle to make up for the roughage they should be getting from grass. I read this stuff and ask myself, ‘what are they thinking?’

“The way we eat now, wholly on food that we invented and manipulated, has created an epidemic of obesity, and cancer, and heart disease, and diabetes,” Jo says emphatically. “It has reached a point where our food makes us sick. Our animals are on a manmade diet also, and just as our diet is bad for us, their diet is bad for them. So humans, and our animals, need to get back to a more natural diet. That is the solution to many of these health problems.”

1 Most fish in the wild eat large quantities of algae, so that’s why fish and fish oil are often recommended by organizations such as the American Heart Association as a good choice for getting more omega-3s into the diet. But just as confinement-raised, grain-fed animals have much lower values of omega-3s than grassfed animals, a recent study from Wake Forest Medical School shows that farmed tilapia, the most highly consumed fish in the American diet, has “has very low levels of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids and, perhaps worse, very high levels of omega-6 fatty acids.”

New Good Food

In 1977, Margaret Witttenberg was teaching in West Bend, Wisconsin, and she and her husband, Terry, opened a small natural food stores. They both worked in the store — she around school hours. A born learner and teacher, Margaret loved experimenting with new foods, and loved passing along what she learned, teaching cooking classes at the store when she wasn’t in the regular classroom.

Their business grew, but in 1981, Margaret and Terry decided they wanted to try a warmer climate: she quit her teaching job, they sold the store, and they headed south. With no particular destination in mind, they rolled into Austin, Texas. They discovered a new grocery store, larger in size, like a modern supermarket, but dedicated to natural foods, had just opened about a month earlier. They thought it might be a fun place to work for a while, getting hired on as employees number 24 and 25 — at the original Whole Foods Market.

Margaret and Terry transferred their skills, acquired at their own small store, to Whole Foods. She taught cooking classes, and did employee training. As the business grew, so did the Wittenberg’s roles. Today Margaret is Whole Foods’ Global Vice President for Quality Standards and Public Affairs. She has served on the National Organic Standards Board, and she is the author of two recent books, New Good Food: Essential ingredients for cooking and eating well (2007) and New Good Food: Shopper’s pocket guide (2008).

Good and Bad News About Food

“I grew up in the 60s and 70s,” Margaret said during our interview. “TANG happened. Space bars happened. Everything was about convenience. What could you just add water to, and have instant food?

“In the 80s we began to see a movement back to real food. That movement has really solidified in recent years with farmer’s markets, the locavore movement, and the growth and mainstreaming of organic foods. There is a celebration of food as something culturally significant. When you look at societies that are doing well, they are intimately connected with their food, they really recognize the enjoyment of food. I think that it’s so wonderful that we’re again making such connections with immediate family, extended family, neighbors and with farmers. We’re returning to food that comes from a plant or an animal, rather than from a package.”

Of course all the news isn’t good, and in the introduction to Essential Ingredients Margaret writes, “To me, the most disturbing of all these issues is the genetic engineering of our food supply.”

With genetically engineered foods now representing a whopping 70% of the processed foods in American supermarkets, I asked Margaret to elaborate on the issue. “I think genetic engineering flies in the face of nature,” she said. “Genetic engineering is manipulating the DNA in order to create something nature wouldn’t create on its own. Splicing a fish gene into a tomato, for example. Some companies that support it say that it is improving sustainability, but in the long run we need to learn how we can work with nature rather than manipulating it at that level. We need to use IPM [integrated pest management] instead of crops that are programmed to to resist pesticides. We need to work with nature to enhance the health of the soil that produce the crops.”

The topic is obviously one that Margaret is passionate about. She rushes on, barely stopping for breath. “I want to ask these companies, what is the long-term intent? Are you trying to improve the soil and health of the plants, or just sell another ag product? There are continued questions on the health and environmental impacts of genetic engineering, and there simply isn’t any long-term testing on what the health implications are. There are a lot of unknowns, while we have centuries of understanding about how to work with nature. Studies have shown that working with nature, and farming organically, can produce the food we need.”

The Books

Margaret’s books are like siblings–they clearly come from the same parent stock, but each is unique. Essential Ingredients is the older, more mature sibling. It provides encyclopedic information on a wide variety of ingredients, including some that may be unfamiliar to most readers. The Shopper’s Pocket Guide is the kid brother, rough and tumble, and with less depth, but plenty of fun. It is small enough to throw in your purse, and uses bullets and charts to get across key information about the same groups of foods as Essential Ingredients. Each has chapters on fruits and vegetables; grains; flours; breads; pasta; beans, peas and lentils; nuts and seeds; culinary oils; meat, poultry, and eggs; dairy; seafood; seasonings; and sweeteners.

I’m always dumb-founded when looking at all the exotic cooking oils that are now available. Beautiful bottles of oil line the shelves, ranging from almond oil to walnut oil, and apricot kernal oil to sesame oil. I’ve been tempted to experiment with some of these alternative oils, but didn’t know enough about them to take the leap. So for me, the first part of the books that I studied was the “Culinary Oils” chapters.

From Essential Ingredients I learned about the history of culinary oils, their healthfulness, how they are produced and refined, about smoke point, and the best temperature for using the various oils. Refined avocado, for example, has the highest smoke point of any oil (510 degrees F) while unrefined avocado can’t take the heat at all. More mere nuggets from the in-depth discussion of oils:

Not only are the New Good Food titles worth perusing for your own enlightenment, I think they would be an excellent choice for any farmer or market gardener who is direct marketing to have available as educational materials for your customers (and maybe even have them for sale at your farmer’s market stand). The Shopper’s Pocket Guide’s fruit and vegetable buying charts, or meat and poultry buying charts, would be excellent resources to share with customers.

And Speaking of Markets

Although Margaret points out that the books are a project she has undertaken as an individual, not related to her job at Whole Foods, I feel like her position is fair game. After all, Whole Foods has helped expand the market for organics and artisan foods, but has also sped the industrialization of organics, which is something of concern to small family farmers. I asked Margaret about what Whole Foods is doing to help maintain the viability of small farms, and how farmers can work with them.

“One of the things that’s very important to us is to celebrate and recognize all producers and understand what they bring to the market. When I first started with Whole Foods Market, and we were one store with 25 employees, and we worked closely with local producers. Over the years, as we were growing larger, we lost a little of that focus, but I’m happy to say that in the last couple of years, as a company we’ve come back to it. We recognize that the soul of food is really connecting with producers, and so now we deal with large producers, but we also want to deal with local producers, and all our stores are putting a focus back on working with the people around them and going back to our roots.”

Margaret explained that Whole Foods is organized into eleven different regions, and each region has “foragers,” or staff that are assigned to make contact with, and help guide local producers into the system. Smaller producers can sell to just one store, or to several stores in a region, depending on their output. They have also developed a low-interest loan program specifically for small-scale, local producers. Contact for the regional offices and information on the loan program are available on the company’s website (www.wholefoodsmarket.com), or ask at a local store.

Canadian List Serve for Poultry and Rare Breeds

Patric Lyster, a farmer and member of Rare Breeds Canada, just let me know about a new resource aimed at Canadian farmers who are interested in preserving poultry and rare breeds of livestock.

Anyone who has ever read any of my books knows that I am an advocate for protecting heritage breeds of poultry and livestock. The genetic diversity in these breeds represents hundreds, or even thousands of years of human enterprise, and are critically valuable to our future. So I was happy to receive an email from Patric Lyster of Coyote Acres, a farm in Alberta, Canada, letting me know about the list serve, Alberta Chickens Etc.. It is a place where farmers and ranchers of Canada can network and share information about all kinds of poultry, and about other heritage breeds of livestock. Patric said, “It is not an Alberta only site, when named we were thinking too small.” Indeed, the site covers all of Canada, and has sections on all species of livestock. The discussions are lively, and the list already has over 130 members!

Happy New Year

I think most of us won’t look back at 2008 as the best of years, but it also wasn’t the worst from the standpoint of sustainable agriculture and the food system.

First, COOL, or country of origin labeling, is happening and that is a great thing. This year’s farm bill boosted the connections between agriculture and energy, including by providing a new funding mechanism for farmers to produce renewable energy on their farms, and it provided more funding through the existing EQIP program for helping farmers transition to organic production.

With the administrative change coming to Washington, many sustainable ag folks are pushing for appointments to USDA that will more truly reflect the needs and realities of family farmers and consumers over agribiz interests. The group Food Democracy Now  is seeking to seed the “Under Secretary” positions at USDA with the “Sustainable Dozen”:

1. Gus Schumacher: Former Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Former Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture. Boston, Massachusetts
2. Chuck Hassebrook: Executive Director, Center for Rural Affairs, Lyons, Nebraska.
3. Sarah Vogel: attorney; former two-term Commissioner of Agriculture for the State of North Dakota, Bismarck, North Dakota.
4. Fred Kirschenmann: organic farmer; Distinguished Fellow, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Ames, IA; President, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Pocantico Hills, New York.
5. Mark Ritchie: current Minnesota Secretary of State; former policy analyst in Minnesota’s Department of Agriculture under Governor Rudy Perpich; co-founder of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
6. Neil Hamilton: attorney; Dwight D. Opperman Chair of Law and Professor of Law and Director, Agricultural Law Center, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.
7. Doug O’Brien: current Assistant Director at Ohio Department of Agriculture; worked for the U.S. House and the Senate Ag Committee; former staff attorney and co-director for the National Agriculture Law Center in Arkansas, Reynoldsburg, Ohio.
8. James Riddle: organic farmer; founding chair of the International Organic Inspectors Association (IOIA); has served on the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s Organic Advisory Task Force since 1991; appointed to the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board, serving on the Executive Committee for 5 years and was chair in 2005, Board of Directors. Winona, Minnesota.
9. Kathleen Merrigan: Director, Agriculture, Food and Environment M.S./Ph.D. Program, Assistant Professor and Director of the Center on Agriculture; Food and the Environment, Tufts University; former Federal Agency Administrator U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Marketing Service; creator of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, mandating national organic standards and a program of federal accreditation. Boston Massachusetts.
10. Denise O’Brien: organic farmer, founder of Women, Food, and Agriculture Network (WFAN); represented the interests of women in agriculture at the World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in 1995l; organized a rural women’s workshop for the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, Italy; received nearly a half million votes in her 2006 bid to become Iowa’s Secretary of Agriculture. Atlantic, Iowa.
11. Ralph Paige: Executive Director, Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund; served as presidential appointment to the 21st Century Production Agriculture Commission; participates on the Agriculture Policy Advisory Committee for Trade; the Cooperative Development Foundation; and the National Agricultural Research, Extension, Education & Economics Advisory Board. East Point, Georgia.
12. Karen Barrett Ross: President of the California Winegrape Growers Association and Executive Director of the Winegrape Growers of America; awarded the Wine Integrity Award by the Lodi Winegrape Commission for her contributions to the wine industry. Sacramento, California.

They have a petition at www.fooddemocracynow.org. Please sign this petition in support of a more sustainable USDA in 2009!

The Lost War on Bugs

I met Will Allen in the mid-1990s while attending a series of national sustainable-agriculture meetings sponsored by the Kellogg Foundation, so I was pleasantly surprised when I picked up The War on Bugs and saw his photo on the inside back cover. In the years since we met, Will moved from California, where he had been managing the nonprofit Sustainable Cotton Project, to Vermont, where he and his wife, Kate Duesterberg, run the for-profit Cedar Circle Farm, an organic vegetable farm nestled on 55 acres along the banks of the Connecticut River in eastern Vermont. They run a CSA, sell through farmers markets, and at an on-farm stand. Will and Kate also formed the Cedar Circle Farm Education Center, an affiliated undertaking that’s dedicated to training future generations in gardening and farming, with emphasis on organic and sustainable agriculture practices and techniques.

Will grew up on a farm, and has been involved in organic farming and advocacy since the early 1970s. The War on Bugs, his first book, is a tour-de-force historical look at how advertising and media has been used, and sometimes abused, in pushing nasty chemicals over the centuries, and at the parallel safe-food movement that has always existed, and is also documented in the media. One interesting aspect of the book is that it is liberally illustrated with the actual copy of the ads, cartoons, and editorial content, from newspapers and magazines dating from the 1700s to the present.

I asked Will how he got started on the project. “When we were doing the cotton project, one of the more dramatic things we did was give tours of industrial and organic cotton farms to elected officials, government regulators, academics, farmers, and the CEOs of clothing companies and cotton processors. Over a thousand people took these tours and I attribute our success in getting companies like Patagonia and Esprit to take the plunge into organic cotton on the tours themselves, which we gave during defoliation time. You’d see 8 or 9 planes in the air at the same time, spraying chemical defoliants–nerve poisons or arsenic–on the fields. Sometimes the busses would get sprayed and you would see this white mess coming down on absolutely everything. It really impacted the people who came on our tours. Most tour participants would ask us, ‘How do people get comfortable with this?  Look, it is on the bus, it must be on their kids, it is in the rivers and canals, the lakes and ponds, over the schools. How do people get used to spraying these poisons on themselves?’

“I couldn’t answer when they asked us this. I didn’t really know how or when people got acclimated to spraying poisons on themselves and their kids, and their homes and schools. So we started asking old-time farmers, ‘When did this start?’ Whether they were 65 or 95, they’d say, ‘This happened way before I was born.’  So, I said, ‘Wow, I need to figure this out.’

The old farmers gave Will copies of their oldest farm magazines, thinking he might be able to discover the genesis of the story there. Will quickly exhausted the supply of magazines his farmer friends sent his way, but then discovered that the University of California at Davis maintains a large and complete collection of farm and rural magazines and newspapers dating back to the 1800s, so he and a research assistant began mining the stacks. Then, his sleuthing took Will to the libraries at Dartmouth and the University of Vermont, with their own ancient collections that helped Will start his story with the European settling of America, before the Revolution.

Growing up on a farm in California, Will saw many chemicals in use. He recalls in the book how his family began using DDT and other chemicals against flies and mosquitos, and how the dosages had to be raised, and the chemicals mixed in new concoctions over time, because the insects developed resistance. Later he did a stint in the marines where he was trained as an atomic, chemical and biological warfare paramedic–training that raised his awareness of the dangers of many of the farm chemicals. After the marines, while working on a Ph. D. in anthropology, he went to Peru to study indigenous farmers, and as he says in the book, “The ability of these farmers to produce surpluses without chemicals in an environment ravaged by pests started me thinking that maybe the miracle chemicals that the salesmen pushed were not so necessary after all. I had never seen so many animal and insect pests and yet they were getting bumper yields. Thereafter, everything that I saw or learned about farming was filtered through that experience.”

As he got back into farming himself, Will avoided using chemicals, and began to learn more about organic production techniques. In the 1970s, 80s, and even the 90s, mainstream agriculture treated organic producers like they were nothing more than nutcases. But Will told me one of the interesting things his research showed was that there was always a resistance movement to the growing use of chemicals.

“There has always been an active safe-food movement that was fighting against chemicals. This started well before Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. She talks about the terribleness of arsenic, for example, but when arsenic was first marketed for farm use in the late 1860s, there was a strong backlash against it. Most farmers refused to use it for 30 years or more. So, this didn’t just start in 1962; it started way, way, way before that and it wasn’t just a response to WWII chemicals. ”

Industrial agriculture still uses massive quantities of toxic chemicals and Will documents this also in the book’s appendix. “The most-heavily used chemicals today are the most toxic chemicals we have ever used in agriculture,” Will tells me, “and we are using them at much higher rates than ever before. To show that we mined the California data on pesticide use reports to show what is on your food in 2005, the most recent year for data before the book went to print.”

For example, California strawberry farmers applied 335 pounds of pesticides per acre, and as Will told me, “You cannot wash that stuff off. Those are systemic pesticides, they stay in the food. You can wash it right down to the seed and you can’t get those pesticides out.

“We know these chemicals are making people sick. If you look at the studies that are coming out, such as the one last week in which they have found out that if you have been exposed to pesticides 250 days in your life you have a 60% higher chance of contracting Parkinson’s than people who don’t have those exposures, or the one a while back that found kids fed chemically-produced fruits and vegetables had organophosphates, a known nerve poison, in their urine and saliva, but as soon as they fed them organic food those organophosphates went away. So just eating food off supermarket shelves, you are going to get nerve poison in your system. That’s crazy.”

Will advocates for the government removing subsidies from corn, wheat, soy, cotton, and rice (the five crops that take over 90% of government farm bill funding) and instead using those funds to help farmers transition to organic and sustainable agriculture. He tells me, “All the stuff we hear about cheap food is baloney. The chemical food you buy at the supermarket looks cheaper than organic: ‘Oh gosh, look this is 25% or 30% cheaper than organic.’ But then you have to realize that you pay another bill on that food when you pay your taxes, and that second bill goes to the farm subsidies. That second installment is about the same as the first installment, so if you compare the real price of our highly processed and chemically grown food it is double the shelf price; organic food is rarely double the price of chemical food. Plus there are other hidden costs: we the tax payers end up paying to cleanup the water and the air from those chemicals and chemical spills, and the consumer also pays more in health care costs for eating chemically-treated food.”

In spite of everything, Will is a real optimist. “When Rachel Carson came along, there wasn’t really an option to eat organically unless you grew your own food, but now there is. Organic is what’s happening in the food sector. Consumers have a choice and farmers have a choice!”

Who Will Be Secretary of Agriculture

President-Elect Obama has been progressing steadily with nominations for his cabinet. He has yet to make the nomination for Secretary of Agriculture, but a group of people long involved with the sustainable agriculture movement have put forth a list of potential candidates, including such well-respected members of the sustainable ag community as Chuck Hassebrook, the  Executive Director, Center for Rural Affairs, Lyons, NE; Fred Kirschenmann, an organic farmer, Distinguished Fellow, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Ames, IA and President, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Pocantico Hills, NY, and Mark Ritchie, current Minnesota Secretary of State, former policy analyst in Minnesota’s Department of Agriculture under Governor Rudy Perpich, co-founder of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

To see the entire slate, and sign a petition in support of a sustainable Secretary of Agriculture, visit
www.fooddemocracynow.org