agriculture sustainable
Originals
Dan Moore's daughter feeding the hogs at Ninja Cow Farm (Credit: Dan Moore)
Bringing the “farm” back to hog farming
A look at the economics and scalability of raising hogs outside—and the characters doing it
RALEIGH, N.C.—Dan Moore's farm marks an abrupt exit from the fringes of suburbia: cookie cooker homes give way as a rolling road weaves you through a dense canopy of deciduous trees.
It would be easy to miss the driveway but for a small sign of a cartoon cow with a sword, the logo for the family farm dubbed, of course, Ninja Cow.
Moore's family has deep roots in North Carolina. His relatives have farmed here for more than a century.
"I tried to leave like most farm kids but got pulled back," Moore tells me on a mid-80s day in April, right before his busy season. The 84-acre Ninja Cow Farm (named after a difficult and elusive cow from years past) is just 20 minutes south of downtown Raleigh. Approaching the farm, you see the hallmarks of encroaching sprawl—manicured lawns, fastidious landscaping, subdivisions. Moore's plot of Earth is wild, well protected, covered by trees—with the hallmarks of people and animals at work.
The farm is half pasture, half wooded. Moore's hogs roam and root among the trees. They squeal, nudge one another, burrow in mud and eat from piles of would-be-wasted Raleigh Farmer's Market produce.
Moore, sporting a flat-brimmed straw farmers hat, dark shades, khaki shorts, sandals and an orange shirt with the Ninja Cow logo, leads me to a 4x4 Gator vehicle for a tour.
His slight drawl, pork business ties and family roots make him pure North Carolina. But his unorthodox, stench-free farm of free-range pigs and cows is an anomalous outlier in a state—and country—where most hogs are raised in buildings, confined by metal cages and subject neighbors to overwhelming smells and polluted waterways.
Economists and researchers say the market is stacked against farmers like Moore. Outdoor hog production has a place, but it's "clearly a niche," says John McGlone of Texas Tech University, who has been researching different techniques of hog raising for years.
His answer on the future is not nuanced: "It's indoors." The reasons are simple: More control, more consistency, lower costs.
However, meat eaters are increasingly looking for local, humane, environmentally friendly pork. Ninja Cow isn't technically a "pasture farm" since the hogs are feeding on produce from the farmer's market and roaming the woods. But it's unquestionably a farm: And that lies at the heart of a move toward raising hogs outside—both from the farmer's and consumer's point of view.
Advocates of outdoor hog raising say the industry model is simply hiding costs in excess pollution, government subsidies and lax regulation.
"Commodity pork is not the true cost of food," says Ross Duffield, farm manager with the Rodale Institute, a Pennsylvania-based research institute advocating for organic farming. "We need to get back in touch with farmers, and farmers need to let consumers know hog pork is raised."Keep reading...Show less
Ron Rosmann. (Credit: Brian Bienkowski/EHN)
Treatment, taste and trends
Giving hogs a diverse diet and some space seems better for their health—and ours
HARLAN, Iowa—Over a lunch of burgers and pork tacos, Ron Rosmann talks about everything from bluegrass music to one of his favorite authors, Mari Sandoz.
But when the topic turns to hobbies, his son interjects: "Your only hobby was farming."
Rosmann, smiles, wipes his mouth. "That's true."
His 700-acre farm is much more than hobby—growing organic oats, beans, turnips, hay, and raising about 90 cows and hundreds of organic hogs annually. Rosmann has dedicated his life to environmentally friendly, family farming.
Back at the farm he gives me the tour with barn kittens following us around.
He has a large hoop structure to contain the pigs, a type that's gaining popularity among outdoor hog raisers. The kittens scare some young piglets as we talk organic feed and watch a sow root around a bit, flop her body down, kick around a couple times and seemingly smile once properly muddy.
Of course I can't confirm the smile. But Rosmann's hogs aren't confined in the metal cages favored by industry, which have been linked to stress in the animals. And increasingly consumers are looking for meat that was raised without such shackles.
Last year a U.S. survey found that 77 percent of consumers are concerned about the welfare of animals they eat. In a national survey in 2014, 69 percent of Americans said animal welfare was a priority when grocery shopping. In another survey the same year by the American Humane Association, 93 percent of almost 6,000 people surveyed said it was "very important" to buy humanely raised products.
Humane treatment of animals ranked more important for respondents than organic, and antibiotic free. This spring, in a Food Demand survey conducted regularly by Oklahoma State University, animal welfare clocked the largest increase in consumer awareness among all factors.
Ross Duffield, farm manager with the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute, a nonprofit research group advocating for organic farming practices, says the 2015 purchase of Applegate Farms by corporate giant Hormel Foods is a sign that corporate agriculture "sees the writing on the wall" and that niche meat may soon not be so niche. Applegate makes natural and organic meats, whereas Hormel was perhaps better know for Spam and had almost no organic presence before the purchase.
Also in 2010 poultry giant Perdue purchased Niman Ranch, which operates one of the largest hog pasture operations in the country by using hogs from hundreds of small pasture hog farmers.
"The taste is much better," Rosmann says of hogs raised outside of confinement facilities. "But it also seems a better environment for the hogs."
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Facing an even hotter, drier climate, Jordan testing desert agriculture.
Engineers from the Sahara Forest Project say they're designing a sustainable farm that uses solar power to desalinate seawater for crops, then uses the runoff to fend off desertification.
OCTOBER 4, 2017 AQABA, JORDAN—Hope in Jordan is taking the form of a cucumber in the desert.
It is not a mirage. Some say it is the future.
In the arid southern desert of Wadi Araba, where scorching temperatures and dust devils leave scant signs of life, a team of environmental engineers is working on a solution for countries on the front lines of climate change, facing drought and rising temperatures.
The engineers say they are designing a sustainable farm that uses solar power to desalinate seawater to grow crops in regions that have been arid for centuries, then uses the irrigation runoff to afforest barren lands and fend off desertification.
Similar ventures have had success in neighboring Israel, but it remains to be seen whether a fully sustainable farm can breathe life into the Jordanian desert and offer a model to a country that cannot spare a drop of its dwindling water resources.
Jordan has struggled for decades with water resources over-stressed by dramatic sudden population growth. Driven by waves of refugees, the population nearly doubled, from 5 million in 2004 to 9.5 million in 2015.
Jordan is currently ranked by the United Nations as the second-water-poorest country on the planet, behind only Bahrain, while increasing desertification due to over-grazing and improper irrigation techniques has reduced its grazable lands by 70 percent in the past three decades.
With the creeping effects of climate change, bringing ever-hotter summers and shorter rainy seasons in the winter, the future for Jordan’s environment is bleak.
In the increasingly drought-prone country, the enhanced evaporation of near-surface water due to decreased rainfall and hotter temperatures in recent years has rapidly increased the salinity of the soil, literally salting the earth. Jordan now has less than 1 percent forest cover and is more than 90 percent desert.
And the changes to come may prove to be even more dramatic.
According to a study published in August by leading researchers in the peer-review journal Science Advances, as soon as 2071 the average temperatures in Jordan could rise by as much as 4.5 Celsius or 8 degrees F. Droughts, the study suggests, could become twice as frequent and twice as long, and rainfall – a major source for Jordan’s dams and water resources – will likely decrease by 30 percent.
“Our results suggest that by the end of the century there will be a substantial increase in concurrent higher temperatures and lower rainfall,” Steven Gorelick, head of Stanford University’s Jordan Water Project and co-author of the Science Advances paper, says by email.
Sahara Forest Project
One potential solution lies in a patch of Jordanian desert that has not yielded crops for hundreds of years.
Originally conceived by environmentalists on the sidelines of the failed 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen, the Sahara Forest Project was devised as a way to roll back the rapid desertification across Africa and the Middle East while addressing food and energy shortages.
“The food-energy-water nexus is very connected to climate change, and in order to address them, we believe you need to take an integrated approach to address all three,” says Joakim Hauge, Sahara Forest Project chief executive officer.
“This all came from a simple perception: we want to use what we have enough of.”
Supported by USAID, the European Union, and the Norwegian government, the commercial project combines solar power, seawater desalination, natural wind power, and computer-monitored controls to get the most out of each drop of water and to revitalize the barren soil.
Neighboring Israel has long worked to farm the arid lands of its Arava (Wadi Araba) and Negev deserts. Although in possession of more fresh water and energy resources than Jordan, it was facing a severe drought in the early and mid-2000s. After heavy investment in desalination, Israel’s production grew in a few short years to more than 130 billion gallons of potable water per year.
Jordan and Israel have pledged to jointly build a desalination plant on the shores of the Red Sea as part of a controversial $900-million project to lay a pipeline from the Red Sea to the contracting Dead Sea, which is below sea-level. But there has been little coordination between the countries’ researchers on the twin effects of climate change that both are fighting: drought and desertification. The Red Sea-Dead Sea project is years away, while timelines for the project on both the Jordanian and Israeli sides remain hazy.
The Sahara project aims to be a “synergy project” to the initiative, linking to the Red-Dead pipeline and using the excess brine and water released by the planned desalination plant for irrigation. While the 60-member international team who had input on the Sahara project did not include Israeli experts, project members say they are open to learn from the Israeli experience as they move forward with their own unique model: a farm that incorporates several technologies to run completely independently.
Self-sufficiency
Self-sufficiency is key for Jordan, which imports 96 percent of its energy needs and cannot afford the electricity or investments needed for large-scale projects.
In its initial test project in Qatar, the Sahara initiative yielded positive results, producing crops at the level of European commercial greenhouses with half the amount of water used in farming in Qatar. But project staff quickly zeroed in on Jordan due to its vulnerability to climate change and its location at the heart of the region’s water and environmental crises.
In a once-barren plot the size of four football fields near the Israeli-Jordanian border, 10 kilometers inland from the port of Aqaba, the Sahara project uses saltwater-cooled greenhouses and an advanced desalination system to produce crops without using a single drop of Jordan’s freshwater resources.
Using photovoltaic solar panels, the project takes in seawater and pushes it through a 6-inch-thick cardboard filter system at the greenhouse’s walls. Freshwater droplets form and evaporate on the other side, increasing humidity in the greenhouse and reducing water requirements for the crops.
Due to the site’s location in a valley surrounded on either side by mountains and hills, it receives constant wind, which is funneled into the greenhouse. The wind and humidity combined drop the temperature in the greenhouse by nearly 15 degrees C, from a baking 40 C (104 F.) to a cool 25 C (77 F.).
Such a drop can make or break a crop in Aqaba and the surrounding Wadi Araba desert, where temperatures reach 45 C in the summer.
Freshwater from the solar-powered, reverse-osmosis desalination system is then used to irrigate the crops. A computer-controlled system provides the crops with just the right amount of water and nutrients at timed intervals.
The second pillar of the project is in outdoor fields adjacent to the greenhouse. Here, run-off from the irrigation, up to 25 percent of the irrigated water, is used to grow crops and plants specifically suited to the Jordanian desert, such as vibrant pink Bougainvillea flower bushes, known locally as majnouna, and towering palm trees.
Over time, these fields return nutrients and moisture to the soil and act as a barrier against the increasing creep of desertification – stopping dust and sand in their tracks. Once the soil improves – within a couple years – Sahara researchers believe they can start cultivating outdoor crops.
Already, flowers and saplings are sprouting from what was once “pure, clean desert.”
Rows of deep green cucumber vines hang in the greenhouse, their fruits a few inches long and sweet and crisp – like the Mediterranean varieties that grow elsewhere in Jordan.
The launch site is projected to produce 130,000 kilograms (140 tons) of vegetables per year and more than 10,000 liters (2,600 gallons) of fresh water per day. Although the project has started with cucumbers as a test crop, it is exploring other potential produce such as tomatoes, eggplants, strawberries, or rhubarb.
Yet the Sahara project claims it has additional, secondary benefits other than crop yields and stopping desertification. The electricity produced by the solar panels, currently at 40 kilowatts competitive with commercial prices, could be sold back to the grid. Future larger farms would create more electricity for the grid.
No ‘silver bullet’
Project organizers admit that while the Sahara Forest Project could become a lifeline for countries such as Jordan and Tunisia, it cannot be a sole provider of food or be applied in all regions. Sahara requires a coastline nearby and sufficient sunshine to power its system.
“This is not a silver bullet that works in all arid areas,” says Mr. Hauge, “but it can work in low-lying arid areas” that can be provided seawater using minimum pumping or energy.
The project has started out small. Only weeks old, despite boasting bountiful cucumber crops, it has yet to be proven to be commercially viable year-round.
Currently, seawater is being trucked into the site, but project directors hope to build their own pipeline, or connect to the planned Red-Dead project in order to expand. The need for security coordination and permits in the Jordan-Israel border area is a sign that even the best-designed project may run into the limits of Middle East politics.
But Jordan itself has made the project a priority, with King Abdullah inaugurating the project personally last month, and his government endorsing the initiative. Sahara and its backers are looking to expand the Jordan site fivefold to 50 acres, with the potential to produce nearly 5,300 tons of crops per year.
The Sahara project is also pursuing similar sites in southern Tunisia and Australia.
While the outlook for vulnerable countries such as Jordan may seem bleak, experts hope to prove that the solution may already be at hand.
“Light, seawater, and land can produce food, water, and renewable energy,” says Hauge.
“All we have to do is integrate the technologies.”
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Puerto Rico: A potential experiment in degrowth?
I’m sure that some will criticize the insensitivity of the timing of this essay. How can you talk about Puerto Rico, climate change, and degrowth at this tragic time?
Puerto Rico: A Potential Experiment in Degrowth?
By Erik Assadourian, originally published by Resilience.org
September 25, 2017
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I’m sure that some will criticize the insensitivity of the timing of this essay. How can you talk about Puerto Rico, climate change, and degrowth at this tragic time? But what time is better than now? There are only going to be more disasters and more tragic times ahead. And if after each one we spend billions on rebuilding costly infrastructure, the resulting carbon emissions are going to contribute to disasters elsewhere in the future. So when better than now to raise this—before billions of dollars are spent rebuilding Puerto Rico (and Houston and Florida too) in the same unsustainable, unresilient way that consumer economies have pursued thus far?
Perhaps the island’s debt crisis combined with this hurricane offers the perfect opportunity for Puerto Rico to develop in a different direction. Perhaps Maria can serve as the start of Puerto Rico’s “special period” where a simpler, more equitable, more sustainable pathway—and yes, poorer in consumer terms—is chosen.
In other words, could this disaster serve as the trigger of an intentional redirection of the island’s development? Could Puerto Rico degrow, and in the process bring about a more sustainable society?
The Benefits of Degrowth
First of all: why should Puerto Rico degrow?
The social and ecological costs of our fossil-fueled consumer culture are apparent—in disease burdens, in obesity rates, in CO2 emissions, and in other ecological costs. Choosing to move away from the consumer economic model could reduce obesity and connected disease burdens, reduce ecological impacts, reduce the stresses of modern day busy-ness, and help rebuild community as people once again work together in community and create webs of interdependence.
So if not the consumer model, how should Puerto Rico develop? Let’s look at Cuba’s special period, when the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent US embargo rapidly forced the country to go in a very different direction: returning to small-scale and sustainable agriculture; using far less energy; turning more to mass transit and bicycles for transportation; and greatly simplifying their economy. In the process, Cuba became one of the few countries with a one-planet ecological footprint that also sustains really high levels of human development outcomes, on par with the far richer United States. (To learn more on this watch this documentary or read this chapter from State of the World 2013.)
Along with requiring a strong state response during the crisis period (food rationing to prevent hoarding for example), this transition also required bold innovations both technological and cultural, such as converting all green spaces into small-scale community gardens. Could Puerto Rico act as boldly?
With a population of 3.4 million, and a higher density than Cuba, it wouldn’t be easy, but it could be possible (particularly as some Puerto Ricans will surely choose to defect from this new path and move to the mainland and as no embargo would mean access the most appropriate technologies to make this transition). So what exactly could be on the table?
Some Steps in the Path to Degrowth
With current estimates suggesting power might stay off for 4-6 months and the Power Authority already bankrupt, perhaps electricity should be rethought altogether. How much do households really need? Solar hot water could provide (very cheaply) hot water and a few solar panels could provide basic electricity requirements for basic lighting and cell phone charging. Air conditioning certainly can be let go. Is refrigeration necessary? This is a technology that feels like a necessity but hasn’t been around that long. Could people forego it (or at least share fewer refrigerators among communities)? Even if not, there are refrigerators available that use very little electricity—100 watt-hours a day—for example. Many other consumption patterns could also be rethought—down to even how housing is designed.
But more important than these changes would be macro-economic changes. How would Puerto Ricans sustain themselves if not as cogs in a consumer economy? Many Puerto Ricans could return to small-scale farming, converting yards, roadsides, soccer fields, schoolyards, and everywhere else into smallholder farms and community gardens. Others could be employed in restoring and expanding remaining forests, cultivating sustainable agroforestry crops, and in creating wetland buffers along coastlines. Many could also be trained as community sustainability and resilience educators to facilitate this transition. Others could be trained as family planning nurses to help bring down the population to a more sustainable level for an island that over the decades will be shrinking in area as sea levels rise. The tourism industry may also flourish in this restorative, idyllic landscape—particularly as the world flocks to Puerto Rico to learn how to implement these changes in their own societies.
At a Crossroads
Essentially the question is whether Puerto Ricans want to continue to be struggling consumers or whether there is an alternative development model that they (and others devastated by disasters) would accept. Could a low-consumption agrarian lifestyle that still provides citizens high levels of education and public health be valued over the consumer model that typically puts access to consumer goods above basic health, education, and security? (Just look at mainland United States where one can buy a hundred types of cereals or smartphones but struggle to find a good doctor or decent school.)
And of course, this is not only about ‘consumer preference.’ One of these models is ecologically restorative, while the other is rapacious and unresilient and will cause suffering to others elsewhere—both now and in the future. Ultimately, we either start making these difficult considerations or eventually after the second, third, or fourth leveling of a nation, the funds to keep rebuilding it will simply disappear. And those nations will be far worse off than if they had taken the more sustainable, less consumeristic path.
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Tucson’s seed library fosters food sovereignty in a desert.
With help from Pima County’s public libraries, Tucsonans grow urban gardens.
With help from Pima County’s public libraries, Tucsonans grow urban gardens.
Maya L. Kapoor Sept. 22, 2017
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In front of the Joel D. Valdez Main Library in Tucson, patrons can claim round concrete landscaping beds for free and create their own gardens with seeds from the library’s seed collection. Some of the three-foot-wide planters are festooned with exuberant jungles of squash, flowers and trellised bean plants, while others look more Zen garden than vegetable garden.
In addition to books and DVDs, in 2012 the Pima Country Public Library system became one of the first in the nation to circulate seeds. Aspiring gardeners can look up varieties electronically, put seeds on reserve and check out 10 packs at a time. Availability changes with the seasons: By mid-September, tomato seeds are long gone, but many other seeds — including dill, arugula, cucumbers, the flat white teardrop shapes of squash seeds, and the small dry beads of tepary beans — rattle in paper envelopes. Participating branches offer support as well as seeds, such as gardening classes, brochures, and, of course, books. The greenest beds flourish with flowers, herbs, vegetables and an idea: That public libraries can be resources for local food growers as well as local readers.
The Seed Library is a free service where patrons can check out seeds just like they would check out a book. When they have harvested the fruit or vegetable, they can return their new seeds to the library.
Courtesy Pima County Public Library
Now, five years in, Pima County librarians hope more growers will start bringing back seeds from the plants they grew, making the collection stronger and better adapted to local conditions over time. “Only maybe 40 percent of the donations we get are from local growers,” says librarian Betsy Langley, who helps manage the seed program. “We want to increase that and have a larger proportion of our circulating seeds be from local gardeners, because one of our goals is to have healthy seed stock and plants that are acclimated to Tucson.” Although there’s no requirement to return seeds, Langley says, “there are definitely some people who are just amazing and donate a lot back.” Seed patrons write their first names on return packets destined for repurposed card catalogs, along with information about the crop that’s useful to the library and future gardeners.
Langley explains that when the seed library began, only a handful existed around the country, generally run by gardening clubs or other community organizations. Pima County’s was one of the first to be run by a public library system. “We are trying to make sure everyone has the same access,” she says. The idea for a seed library came from sellers at a local farmers’ market; librarians quickly realized they already had the infrastructure in place. What’s more, Tucson is home to Native Seeds/SEARCH, a globally known regional seed saving organization that specializes in conserving and sharing desert-adapted landraces.
Ethnobiologist and author Gary Nabhan cofounded Native Seeds/SEARCH in the early 1980s, when he and a research partner were told by members of local tribes that traditional food crops were in danger of disappearing — and that tribal members’ health could benefit from their return. Today, Native Seeds/SEARCH safeguards some 1,900 accessions of domesticated crops and wild relatives, related to the agricultural practices of more than 50 indigenous groups, as well as Hispanic communities and Anglo settlers. Tribal communities in the region have free access to seeds. Native Seeds/SEARCH also teaches workshops where students learn to use, save and share local food plants.
Native Seeds/SEARCH helped the seed libraries get started through training and seed donations. Nabhan shares Langley’s interest in making gardening more accessible to all. “Sometimes the heirloom vegetable movement gets rarified, that it’s only for the gourmet,” Nabhan says. “But (in Tucson), it’s really an indigenous and immigrant movement. It’s in the households of the poor who can’t afford high water bills, whose kids need diverse nutrition.”
One library patron who enthusiastically returns seeds is a man whom I’ll call Mark. Mark has declined to give his name because he’s a self-identified “guerilla gardener:” one who, under cover of anonymity and secrecy, attacks his city’s rundown corners with greenery. In Tucson’s overlooked places — an empty wash, dusty highway verge, cracked parking lot — Mark plants things. What’s more, Mark scavenges plants and plant parts: seeds dropped by flowers on a lawn here, transplants gleaned from succulents or cacti on city property there. Though the results are lovely, all of this is of questionable legality. But Mark can’t seem to help himself. When the highway department created a drainage area between two roads a couple of miles south, Mark planted it with vegetables. Most of it got eaten by wildlife, but he didn’t mind. “There are so many javelina there, deer, rabbits,” he says, grinning. He’s waged a relentless battle with the gas station across the street from where he lives. He plants date palms at the edge of their parking lot; they remove them. They finally missed one, and now it’s shoulder high — and too thorny to mess with. “It won’t have dates in my lifetime, but someday,” Mark says.
One hot Sunday this September, after selecting seeds from the library’s repurposed card catalog, Mark shows off his planter near the front entrance. He’s slender, dressed in jeans, a faded black tee shirt, and a sweatband under a baseball cap, with deep crowsfeet lining his face. Despite the searing desert heat, his garden grows a multilayered thicket. Nasturtiums sprout at the bottom, squash climb metal trellises, and above that a stout chili pepper tree shelters everything, with countless other plants winding in-between. The topsoil Mark added to this planter, he gathered from a city landscaping project down the block. Hiding in his veggies are purloined pieces of cacti and succulents of dubious origin, so healthy they seem to be glowing in his borrowed soil.
When Mark sees library planters that other gardeners have abandoned, that guerrilla gardening instinct kicks in: He fosters them, planting library seeds. “If they come back, I’ll say, ‘I planted it for you,’ ” Mark says, shrugging. He points across the street to the sandwich shop, which has planters next to the sidewalk. “Imagine if that had watermelon instead of flowers,” he says. “People who were hungry could just walk by and pick fruit.” That’s no small dream; in the summer, Pima County’s main library shelters many homeless people from heat that regularly climbs above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. One man tells me he wanted to buy a banana at a nearby bagel shop but demurred because of the price: $1.75.
Mark began urban growing after a long battle with severe chronic depression and homelessness. He lived on his mother’s farm in the Philippines before moving to Seattle some 50 years ago. After an acrimonious divorce, Mark found himself depressed, homeless and broke. A counselor suggested trying a sunnier location, so he rode the Greyhound to Tucson two decades ago. Eventually, he found himself able to start working again. “You have to have the passion for it,” Mark says, pointing to one planter with a shock of greenery several feet high. “I taught that girl about gardening, and look at her plants now!”
Mike Lang looks at parsnips and peppers at the Pima County Public Library ‘Seed Library’ at the main branch in downtown Tucson.
Courtesy Pima County Public Library
The seed library’s popularity continues to swell. “In the last couple of years, we checked out about 28,000 seed packets each year. The first year we circulated about 7,000. That gives you an idea how much it’s grown,” Langley says. Indeed, the popularity of the seed lending program has become a new challenge for Langley; the main branch library where she works processes all of the seeds before they go out to the other branches. “It’s growing so much and all the libraries want to have it, but we can’t keep up the back end in terms of staff time,” she says.
According to the Seed Library Social Network, some 280 Western communities ranging from Anchorage, Alaska, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, have launched or are considering launching seed lending programs, many in public libraries. Interested communities often call Pima County’s libraries for advice. Not everyone supports seed lending programs: Although libraries lend seeds, state Departments of Agriculture have informed some that they are in violation of seller-focused laws, such as requirements to regularly test seed germination rates. “Of course we don’t have the resources for that,” Langley says. In a fall meeting of the Arizona Library Association, groups with seed libraries plan to share notes on how to manage such confrontations, should they arise.
At some 4,000 years old, Tucson, Arizona, is the longest continuously inhabited place in North America. This is one reason that the region’s food crop diversity interests people like Gary Nabhan of Native Seeds/SEARCH: Farmers around Tucson have had a long time to work with crops and their wild relatives. And aridland seeds have had a jump start on traits — such as tolerance to heat, drought and poor soils — that are becoming more precious with growing greenhouse gas emissions.
Beans from the Pima County Public Library 'Seed Library.'
Courtesy Pima County Public Library
These days, when Tucsonans grow plants from seed to seed, sharing with other library patrons, they continue this millennia-old tradition. For its One Seed program, the library selects a local, easily grown, wind or insect pollinated plant that gardeners around the city grow at the same time, with librarians walking them through each step of the process, from planting to harvest. This year, gardens throughout Tucson are growing a heritage breed of cowpea developed by Tohono O’odham farmers. “We wanted to choose a native plant that has a history here,” Langley says.
Langley looks forward to collecting any donated cowpea returns. She says having harvests grown out by many gardeners will make the seed packets stronger. “We’re going to have jars at all of the locations, so people can see how their contribution makes a difference and combines with other community members’.” The seeds will be repackaged and loaned out again: a community’s worth of saved seeds, stronger for the mixing.
Maya L. Kapoor is an associate editor for High Country News.
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Farmer wants a revolution: 'How is this not genocide?'
Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says – yet chemicals used in agriculture are ‘causing millions of deaths’. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food.
The kurrajong tree has scars in its wrinkled trunk, the healed wounds run long and vertical under its ancient bark. Standing in front of the homestead, it nestles in a dip on high tableland from which there is a clear view across miles and miles of rolling plains to the coastal range of south-east Australia.
Charles Massy grew up here, on the sweeping Monaro plateau that runs off the eastern flank of Mount Kosciuszko, an only child enveloped by the natural world, running barefoot, accompanied by dogs and orphaned lambs. Fifth generation, he has spent his adult life farming this tough, lean, tussock country; he is of this place and it of him. But when his friend and Aboriginal Ngarigo elder Rod Mason came to visit he discovered that a lifetime of intimately knowing the birds, trees and animals of this land wasn’t significant at all.
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The tree is probably a lot older than 400 years. Rod told him that when the old women walked their favourite songline tracks they carried seeds of their favourite food and resource plants, and sowed them at spirituality significant camping places. His front garden was one such ceremony place – there would have been a grove planted, and the women had stripped the bark from the tree to make bags and material. This old tree represented a connection to country “deeper than we can imagine, and linking us indivisibly with the natural world”, he writes in his book Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth.
Part lyrical nature writing, part storytelling, part solid scientific evidence, part scholarly research, part memoir, the book is an elegant manifesto, an urgent call to stop trashing the Earth and start healing it. More than that, it underlines a direct link between soil health and human health, and that the chemicals used in industrial agriculture are among the causes of modern illness.
It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial
“Most of our cereal crops, the soybeans, the corn, are all predicated now on the world’s most widely used chemical which is glyphosate [Roundup],” Massy says. “There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system. Its main effect is on the human gut and our entire immune system.
“When you look at the As – autism, ADHD, all the other auto-immune diseases – their take off is a 95% correlation to these chemicals being introduced. The evidence is that it affects the gut and the immune system, though it is not the sole factor, and it is a complex thing. But it is that gut that drives our whole immune system, it is our second brain.”
Roundup in a supermarket
‘There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system,’ Charles Massy says of Roundup. Photograph: Rene van den Berg/Alamy
He says that when you spray insects with insecticides you kill off the predators so you have got to have more powerful chemicals next time because the pests come back stronger. “Roundup is now on its sixth or seventh phase.”
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Massy is among scientists who believe we have entered a new geological epoch, the life-threatening Anthropocene, where human impact has permanently altered the Earth’s geology and sustaining systems, causing ecological destruction and extinction of species. “It is the greatest crisis the planet and humanity has ever faced,” he says, sitting at his kitchen table in country New South Wales. “It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial.”
Tall, lean, fit, with white hair crowning a face that has spent a life outdoors, Massy looks more like the establishment grazier he is rather than a powerful advocate for revolutionising everything about the way we farm, eat and think about food. We are at a tipping point, he says, and if we it ignore we are “history”.
Massy spent eight years going to his office in an outbuilding behind the house in the early hours of morning to write before a day of working on the farm; the 569-page book is his life’s work; the big picture, the long view both historical and into the future that pulls together the latest international scientific research and thinking on climate change, regenerative farming, industrial agriculture and the corporations driving it.
He writes: “While consuming more resources than the Earth’s systems can replenish, we are hurtling towards multiple calamities. We are degrading the air we breathe, denaturing the food we eat and water we drink and lacing them with a witch’s brew of deadly poisons.”
We have lost touch with the land, we manipulate the Earth to our own ends, we dominate it and are ultimately destroying it. Aboriginal people, he says, saw it differently, as something to be nurtured and nourished, a living entity. He calls their custodianship “one of the greatest ever sustainable partnerships between humankind and the ecosystems they occupied”.
Farmer and author Charles Massy
The farmer, scientist and author at home on his property, Severn Park. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
Then white Australians brought what he calls the mechanical mind and the European mind. “It is a totally different continent to anywhere else in the world. It works totally differently to that young landscape of Europe with humidity and rich soils. Until we throw off the European mechanical mind we are going to continue to stuff the joint. It is not something inanimate that you can belt. It is almost like being with a lover, you have got to nurture it and care for it.”
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Now 65 and “a fossil” Massy is, by his own admission, a “biophilia”, filled with the wonder and delight of nature. “I believe one cannot gain true ecological literacy without a great empathy with, and understanding of, nature and how it functions. Thus one’s heart also needs to be involved.”
But his own journey and awakening was slow and stumbling. He was at university when, at the age of 22, his father had a heart attack and he came home to manage the merino and cattle property. Well-intentioned and diligent he read the books, he sought advice, he learned. “I thought I was running a pretty good show.” His wool was being bought for fabric by “the top guys in Italy. We were the first group to breed animal welfare-friendly sheep.” But he now realises he was “blind” and “oblivious”, he saw the landscape “as if through a glass darkly”.
He writes: “I completely overlooked the most important of all factors, the keystone of the whole operation: that our farm was a complex and dynamic series of ecological systems, and that our landscape actually functioned in specific but sensitive ways.” He made mistakes; he assiduously ploughed a paddock just before a huge storm came and washed the topsoil away, “I had cost the landscape perhaps a thousand years of topsoil.” Like many other regenerative farmers he reached the conclusion he had to make a big shift when something “cracked” his mind open.
If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away
For Massy it was the years of drought, 1979 to 1983, that plunged him into depression and major debt. He finally understood that he needed a completely different mindset and management approach if he was going to come to terms with the reality of drought. “The land, soils, micro-organisms and other creatures and vegetation are adapted to this,” he writes. And so he began his journey towards enlightenment. After 35 years he went back to university and completed a PhD in human ecology, consulting everyone from scientists to Aboriginal elders.
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We are driving in his ute across the plateau, cloud shadows dancing across the big-sky landscape, kangaroos and wallabies bouncing along, kelpies on the back to muster the healthy sheep. The paddocks are strewn with great monolithic rocks, 400m years old. There are birds and wildlife that have returned since he became a holistic farmer. Deep in the soil the bugs, microbes and fungi are sourcing nitrogen and nutrients. Change has to literally be grassroots, food health comes from the ground up, the health of people is entwined with the health of landscapes and soil. “The minute you fertilise and spray all that biology is gone. The vital thing about regenerative or organic farming is this healthy living dynamic soil. Landscapes with diverse arrays of plants are nutrition centres and pharmacies with vast arrays of primary and secondary compounds.”
As the dogs bound away to herd the sheep, he says, “One of the big ideas I discovered going back to uni was this concept which I came to, that our natural complex systems will self-organise themselves back to health. I think it is one of the biggest ideas. I think it is as big as evolution. It has only just emerged with physics and chemistry and computers and stuff. The Earth itself it is a self-organising regulating system.”
The human element is the problem, the learning how to live tuned to its rhythms, to get out of its way, to listen to the land. “I say confidently that not many farmers can read the landscape. For them to change they have got to admit they have been wrong for most of their lives. The thing that is challenging about it is that you have got to be totally flexible to adjustment and really get your mind into how nature works and be able to change tactics.”
He tells the story of the grasshoppers. Before he began holistic grazing the property was regularly hit by plagues of wingless grasshoppers. “They turned an OK season into instant drought. They thrive under degrading management, bare ground provides them with egg beds. But once we began our biodiverse plantings plus holistic grazing we have not had a grasshopper attack since.
The entrance to Charles Massy’s property
The entrance to Severn Park: ‘Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property,’ Massy says. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
“Ecological grazing yields total ground cover, higher cover, deeper roots, more moisture absorption plus more biologically alive soils; it means nematodes and other creatures eat the grasshopper eggs. You get excited when you see a new plant species suddenly emerge again. Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property.”
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The winter nights are cold on the plateau and, with a glass of red wine and before an open fire, Massy is unrepentant about criticising the big-end-of-town companies that promote chemicals in industrial farming, and the governments that don’t act. In the book he says unhealthy food “is not just poisoning us but is also, confoundingly, making us obese as well”. Now he says “when you are eating that McDonald’s crap even though you are bloated your body is still hungry because your organs are not getting nutrients.
“If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away. The big chemical companies and big food companies know exactly what they are doing. It is now causing millions of deaths – tell me why that is not genocide?”
But just as nature find its own solutions, culling, reorganising, so too is Massy offering answers, a “toolkit” of how to change.
“This combines the best of Old Organic – namely its respect, empathy and reverence for Mother Nature – with the best of modern, ecologically simpatico science and Earth-empathic thought.” The kind of people who make the change, he found, were those with strong belief in community and healthy food that does not come from contaminated soil.
Call of the Reed Warbler cover
What lies beneath “is a burgeoning mass of life and activity that is 10-fold that above the ground; fungi bacteria, and other organisms have begun to create and sustain an entirely different, living absorbent soil structure; the very heart and essence of healthy farming and landscape function. The secret is to simply restore healthy landscape function and allow nature to do the rest.”
Massy agrees that he is “not naive enough to think it would be a nice seamless shift. I think we are going to see some pretty frightening stuff.”
But for him, a defining moment came when, while sitting against an old snow gum, he heard the “beautiful, piercing song of a reed warbler” returning after a long absence from this area. It was, he says, a “metaphor for us humans to once more become the enablers, the nurturers, the lovers of Earth”.
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From coal to kale: Saving rural economies with local food.
Many counties are switching to oil and gas production as coal's fortunes wane, but farms, food hubs, and community kitchens may keep rural areas alive.
From Coal to Kale: Saving Rural Economies with Local Food
Many counties are switching to oil and gas production as coal's fortunes wane, but farms, food hubs, and community kitchens may keep rural areas alive.
BY STEVE HOLT
Climate, Food Policy, Local Eats
09.20.17
Coal Country USA has seen a very bleak few years. As mines have shut down around the nation, local economies have suffered. In fact, 77 percent of the 196 coal-producing counties in America had not returned to pre-recession job levels, with jobless rates as high as 16 percent in some places.
And, while many of those communities have replaced coal with oil and natural gas extraction, others are turning to local food as an economic driver.
A new book co-published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis says the time has never been better for thriving regional food systems, given Americans’ increasing interest in fresh, local food. In Harvesting Opportunity: The Power of Regional Food System Investment to Transform Communities, Deborah Tropp, deputy director of marketing services at USDA, points to data showing that consumers are willing to pay more for food produced in their own communities.
Increasingly, farms are responding: more than 167,000 U.S. farms sold their food directly to consumers in their areas in 2015, resulting in $8.7 billion in revenue, according to the authors. And data cited in the report suggest that more than half of local farm sales in 2012 were through intermediaries like wholesalers or institutions, suggesting an even more lucrative prospect for regional producers.
“Recognition is growing that support of small/local farm businesses may keep a greater share of money recirculating in the local economy and allow farmers to retain a greater share of consumer expenditures on food,” Tropp writes in the book’s first chapter.
The authors also note that so much more is possible, and that food has the potential to transform rural communities across the nation, with the right mix of support from local and federal governments, investors, banks, and philanthropists. The ground may be especially fertile in communities traditionally reliant on coal. For one, many coal-mining communities are also farming communities.
Coal’s Demise
Take Delta County, Colorado. For decades, the region’s coal companies flourished. Good-paying jobs attracted miners from across the nation. Towns like Somerset and Paonia, built by coal, were busting at the seams.
And then, almost overnight, it was nearly all gone. Following a slow recovery from the last economic downtown, the rapid closure of two of the region’s three largest mines between 2013 and 2016 sent shockwaves of panic throughout the area. Over the last four years, nearly 1,000 coal jobs—many of which paid upwards of $80,000 annually—vanished from the county. The one remaining mine is now under bankruptcy protection and on life support, every job hanging in the balance.
As many residents, especially younger ones, left the county to find work elsewhere, financial hardship hit many of the mining families who stayed. Enrollment in the public schools plummeted, while enrollment in the schools’ free or reduced lunch program nearly doubled, says Trish Thibodo, executive director of Delta County Economic Development, Inc. Revenues at area businesses have been flat for years.
“They were the volunteers at the schools, they were the coaches,” says Robbie LeValley, Delta County administrator, of the region’s mining families. “Their families were just critical to building this county.”
County officials and business leaders have been driven to envision life and business in Delta County after coal. One vision is a county teeming with productive farms and value-added food businesses marketing and distributing the region’s bounty throughout the state. This was the recommendation made in a recent strategic plan by county officials. Published last year, the plan recommended looking to food and agriculture to turn its economy around.
The county is already home to one of the state’s largest concentration of organic produce farms and livestock ranches. But many producers here, lacking more efficient distribution channels, put tens of thousands of miles on their own vehicles driving their products to restaurants and farmers’ markets as far as a state away.
Leaders envision the creation of a thriving food hub in Delta County, where ears of the area’s famous sweet corn, for example, can be marketed and distributed to restaurants and institutions and excess produce made into foods like salsa and jam in a new commercial incubator kitchen. Producers and farmers would receive business assistance as well, with longer-term plans including the creation of a food manufacturing certificate at Delta-Montrose Technical College and regular conferences on agricultural innovation.
“They may be making a great sauce or chocolate, but don’t necessarily have the skill base or the experience around distribution, marketing, planning and financials,” says Thibodo, who’s leading much of the effort. “We’re doing specialized support in that area.”
County Administrator LeValley will benefit from a bolstered local food sector herself. She is a fourth-generation cattle rancher, the co-owner of a direct-to-consumer beef operation and processing facility. She says that in addition to taking its food throughout the state, Delta County could become a food and farm destination for tourists.
“This area has always been very innovative in its agriculture,” she says. “We want to invite people here to enjoy what we have.”
Food as an Economic Driver
Delta County isn’t the only community thinking big about the power of local food, says Sanah Baig, program director with the National Association of Counties, which has been helping traditionally coal-reliant communities retool and diversify their economies since 2014. “No one community should rely on one employer—it’s not sustainable, not good for business, and it doesn’t let people sleep well at night,” she adds.
Across Appalachia, for instance, where more than 33,000 coal mining jobs disappeared between 2011 and 2016, diversification efforts are underway to provide people with technology training, courses for small-air drone operation, and careers in the natural gas utility and pipeline industry. Local food systems could also play a major role in revitalizing the economy.
Appalachian Sustainable Development was one of several agriculture-focused groups to receive a Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) grant funded partially by the U.S. Department of Labor. The funding will help the nonprofit, which runs a large, successful food hub called Appalachian Harvest, to create and support a “food enterprise corridor” across 43 counties in five states to connect growers and value-added food producers to wholesale markets across the region. The corridor has also received funding from the Just Transition Fund and CoBank.
Another POWER grant recipient, Sprouting Farms, is a newer program training and incubating new farmers in two valleys in central West Virginia. The project, which aims to create 20 new businesses and 33 jobs, also hopes to leverage nearly $1 million in additional investment from private and public sources.
In all of these cases, it’s important to note that the authors of Harvesting Opportunity stress that initiatives like these can’t be solely funded by the federal government. It can provide an agricultural project some seed funding through a grant or low-interest financing, but foundations, corporations, and other private investors need to step in to sustain these projects and build capacity.
“If the government, which is so risk averse, is willing to put money into these communities, then the private sector has a lot to gain by doing the same,” says Baig. “This is a call to action for them to step up to the plate.”
Colorado Town at an Economic Junction
Back in Colorado, oil and gas is still one of the state’s largest employers, contributing more than $31 billion to the state’s economy annually. But like coal and other extractive industries, oil and gas is prone to cycles of boom and bust.
The people of Grand Junction, located just 40 miles from the Utah state line in Western Colorado and 250 mountainous miles from Denver, know this all too well. In 1982, on a day known locally as Black Sunday, Exxon ceased its extensive oil shale operation in the region, resulting in thousands of job losses and large-scale migration from the area. A decade ago, natural gas drilling on the Western Slope—including the Grand Junction—hit an all-time high, and the town thrived. But then, the Great Recession brought yet another bust.
Annalisa Pearson of the Business Incubator Center has witnessed the impact that downturns have on families and businesses and would like to see Grand Junction break free from the whims of the boom-bust cycle. She sees a thriving local-foods sector as a way to do that. In 2004, the Center opened its commercial kitchen incubator, which serves as a professional space to produce value-added foods and a commissary for a number of food trucks. In all, more than 30 food businesses now use the space.
In Pearson’s mind, there was always a sense that more could be done to support producers on the Western Slope. For instance, she found that if each household in the county spent just 10 percent of their cook-at-home food budget locally, $24 million would go into the pockets of the area’s farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs. A commitment from restaurants to source 10 percent of their food locally would add another $6.2 million to that equation. Last March, Pearson convened a group of small- and medium-sized food producers, as well as potential buyers, to begin talking about how they could leverage local food as an economic driver.
In attendance was rancher Kathryn Bedell, whose 85 head of cattle and sheep graze more than 10,000 mountainous acres in the county. She shared her experiences as a single mom, loading cattle into the truck by herself, the 120-hour workweeks, and the 40,000 miles a year she put on her truck hauling beef and lamb to six farmers’ markets between Glenwood Springs and Mesa, Utah.
“When you try and run any kind of business, from growing all the food to marketing it to getting it to the end user, there are so many steps,” she says. “If we can take [marketing] off [farmers’] plates, that will give them more time to grow.”
Building on the success of the incubator kitchen, Bedell, Pearson, and the rest of the steering committee have begun work on a regional food hub that will promote the county’s bounty, provide business and distribution support to producers, and build a larger processing space. Long-term, they envision a permanent indoor public market where visitors can buy meat, cheese, produce, and wine. Grand Junction would be the hub, distributing local food across Western Colorado.
“For us, it’s creating a community with enhanced economic and social benefits,” Pearson says.
There will always be those in the community who want Grand Junction to remain an oil town, Bedell says, but continuing to throw everything at such a volatile industry doesn’t make much sense. “On the other hand,” she says, “we can pick something else we’re good at and go with that.”
Photos courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
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