Change from the bottom up

We've been on a bit of a sustainable agriculture kick lately.  We've blogged about The Land Institute's work on perennializing grains and grasses, Matt Liebman's work on crop rotation and conservation planting, the implications of this year's World Food Prize being awarded to high tech ag, more realistic economic models, and so on.  These all address the Big Picture, the idea being that current technology-oriented agricultural practices, and economic models that treat natural resources as unlimited are not sustainable in the long run.  Or even the medium run, and that there are changes that can, and must, be made to slow climate change and the economic impact of continuing on the path we're on.

But we can't all perennialize grain.  Yep, think global, act local.  As long as our politicians aren't going to take climate change seriously enough to enact significant controls (cap carbon!), and as long as biotech money is in the pockets of those politicians, the only significant change is going to happen if we the people make it happen.  (If you missed Russell Brand on revolution last week, here he is, forcefully saying much the same thing.  It will inspire either your activism or your scorn.)

Eat Local
But, this isn't new.  The number of farmers' markets in the US, and elsewhere, has been growing for decades, CSAs (farms doing community supported agriculture) as well, colleges are seeing higher demand for degrees in agriculture.  Granted, many of these graduates are snapped up by the biotech industry, but many of them are interested in the local food movement and are growing food and starting CSAs and selling at their local farmers' market.

Ken and I had the opportunity recently to meet a number of people working on issues to do with sensible agriculture, food security and climate change in their local communities. Among them were Tracy Sides, who just won a million dollars from the city of St Paul, Minnesota to rehabilitate an old warehouse and turn it into a food hub.  She is calling this the "Urban Oasis", a centralized facility that will process produce, meat and fish from local farmers for sale in an onsite café and to local schools, hospitals and restaurants, and more.  The University of Minnesota announcement of this U of M alum initiative describes it this way:

The Urban Oasis, or food hub, would be the focal point for local produce, fish, and meat, and would combine a food processing operation with a kitchen, a classroom, a café, and an events center. And it would help transform an abandoned, graffiti-littered building in the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary—on St. Paul’s East Side between I-94 and the Mississippi River—east of the burgeoning Lowertown area and practically in Sides’ own backyard. 

Cassi Johnson in Minnesota works to improve community health by teaching about the connection between good food and good health.  She has been doing similar work for a decade.  Kim Bayer is one of the organizers of the Washtenaw Food Hub in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  She has a long history as a community organizer, and is founder and president of the Great Lakes CSA Coalition, which promotes CSA farms and wellness rebates from insurers.  She is also involved with her local Slow Food chapter as well as other food-related community organizations and issues.

Terra Brockman is a 4th generation farmer in Illinois, a speaker, and founder of The Land Connection, an educational nonprofit that connects farmers and would-be farmers with land, teaches sustainable farming practices, and educates consumers about sensible food choices.  She is a founding member of The Edible Economy Project, an Illinois food hub this time, with the aim of expanding markets for local farmers as well as expanding local food access for consumers.  She is also the author of a beautiful book, The Seasons of Henry's Farm, about her brother's thriving CSA farm.  It may be Henry's farm, but it takes a multigenerational family, and more, to make it work.

Farmers' Market, Bridgehamton, NY; Wikipedia

Jason Bradford is the founding director of Farmland LP in Corvallis, Oregon, an organization that has bought thousands of acres of farmland in Oregon and California, with the goal of connecting farmers with affordable land farmed with sustainable practices.  Mary Berry is executive director of the Berry Center in Kentucky which she established in 2011 to carry on the work of her grandfather John Berry, her uncle John Berry Jr, and her father, Wendel Berry.  The Center "was established to continue the Berry family's work in culture and agriculture by working on issues of farmer education, consumer education, land use, agricultural policy and urban/rural connectedness."

Kelly Hauser currently works with the international NGO One Acre Fund to bring sustainable agriculture techniques and small-scale economic practices to small farmers in Burundi.  Karen Lehman has been working on food system issues for thirty years, and is currently director of Fresh Taste, an organization dedicated to relocalizing Chicago's food system and addressing issues of equitable access to good food.  Julia Olmstead, an outreach specialist with University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension, works with Wisconsin farmers to improve agricultural water systems to improve water quality and make them more resistant to climate change.

Ricardo Salvador, senior scientist and director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, works with scientists, politicians, economists and the public on developing a healthy food system based on sustainable farming practices.  He was the first professor to teach a sustainable ag course at a land-grant university, in 1989, and he hasn't stopped teaching and writing about the issues.

This work does not go unremarked.  Alan Guebert for one, who grew up on a farm and now writes about agriculture issues, is bringing the message to students, farmers, people on the ground as well as politicians making the decisions about things like whether corn-based ethanol is a good investment, or the kind of farming this year's Farm Bill should support. Bob Jensen, a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, is passionately interested in sustainable ag and climate change issues, and writes prolifically about them and about activism itself.

These people all have friends, and their friends have friends, and they in turn have friends; it starts to look like a movement. 

The Land Institute and the 50-Year Farm Bill

Agriculture is a major, if not the major contributor to loss of biodiversity, unclean water and ecosystem destruction, with ominous possible prospects for the future of our survival.  But there are many people thinking about how to lessen its impact.  Mark Bittman did a fine job a few weeks ago describing the work of one of those people.  Wes Jackson and The Land Institute that he founded 37 years ago on the Kansas prairie represent a growing awareness that agribusiness can and must change.  They are working to make it possible for agriculture to transition from annual monoculture, 80% of agriculture today, to perennial polyculture, that is, from growing a single crop that must be planted from seed every year to fields of multiple, complementary perennial plants chosen to contain pests and weeds, and contribute to soil retention, not erosion.

Source

The Land has done the hard work of perennializing a grain they call Kernza, although more needs to be done before it's finally commercially available, perhaps within 8 years. (See this for a report on bread made with Kernza flour.)  We think The Land will deserve a Nobel Peace Prize when Kernza's finally on the market.  Norman Borlaug was awarded one in 1970 for his work on the Green Revolution.  Perennializing grain will be even more significant, as it has the potential to decouple farmers from agribusiness and its unsustainable practices growing hybrid annual grains requires (indeed, to reverse many of the effects of the Green Revolution).  Agribusiness is big business, but trades short-term profit for long-term survival.

Why is soil erosion such a problem?  Because soil is essentially a non-renewable resource; it takes on the order of 1000 years to create 2 centimeters of topsoil, which, given conventional monocultural practices, can wash away in a single season.  Industrial-agriculture relies on monocultures based on annual plants that must be replanted each year, and that means plowing and loosening the soil.  And, annuals, with short lifespans, only put down short roots.  

When soil erodes, it takes with it tons of toxic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers that were applied during the growing season, which end up in rivers, and then the mouths of rivers as in the Gulf of Mexico, where they can create huge dead zones, thousands of square miles of hypoxic waters, unable to support marine life (except for jellyfish, which thrive in these hypoxic zones; it's not a good sign when jellyfish take over).  Perennial plants with their deeper roots can be a major contributor to the prevention of soil erosion.  And, polyculture well-considered requires less toxic chemical use, less fertilizer, and less tilling of the land.

NASA-NOAA map of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; Wikimedia

5-Year Farm Bills/50-Year Farm Bill
But Bittman, and Jackson in the video accompanying the op/ed, already told this story beautifully.  What we want to talk about today is the 50-Year Farm Bill proposed by Jackson and colleagues.  Since the Great Depression, food and farm policy in the US has been structured according to farm bills that are passed every 5 years or so.

These bills have been largely political mine fields and pork barrels that maintain agribusiness more than they are solutions for the real environmental, cultural and financial problems plaguing agriculture today.  It's not all bleak, however -- since the 1990's a small fraction of the budget has been dedicated to funding beginning farmers, minority farmers, organic farmers, and fruit and vegetable farmers (these are "specialty" crops).  This has been important.

But, the 2008 Farm Bill has expired, and the temporary extension passed by Congress did not include funding for these programs. As Brian Snyder, president of PASA, Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, put it in a recent blog post, 'What's at Stake in the Farm Bill?":

Even taken together, these important reform efforts are still a fairly small fraction of total farm bill spending, but they have an outsize impact – and they are helping to create the foundation for a more a more sustainable and equitable farm and food system in America.

Good news: these innovative programs were all funded as part of the last farm bill that ran from 2008 to 2012.

More good news:  they also receive renewed, and in some cases increased, funding in one or both of the Senate and House farm bills currently being considered in Congress.

Very bad news: when the current farm bill had to be extended in January to give Congress more time to complete it, nearly all of these innovative programs were denied funding in the farm bill extension that was negotiated between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and passed by Congress on January 1 of this year.

The Congress is currently debating very different versions of the new bill from the House and Senate.  One of the major sticking points this time around, at a time in our history when one of the fiercest debates in Washington is the extent to which the government should help the undeserving poor, is the amount of money that will go to the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), food stamps -- this is thanks in no small part to tea partiers who've decided that it's their job to keep tax money from people who need it.  But innovative farm programs are also at stake.

Again, as Brian Snyder writes,

Congress should seize the opportunity to get our food and farm policy back on track.  Congress should pass a new five-year farm bill that includes robust funding for the programs that keep our families fed and healthy, build local economies, protect and restore natural resources, and spur the next generation of farmers.

Cap carbon!
How soon Congress will pass a bill is not at all clear, mired as it is in extremist politics.  The Land Institute, in any case, proposes a much broader view, with attention to food security and sustainable practices for the long term.  Jackson and Wendell Berry wrote in an op/ed in The New York Times in 2009, "We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities." The aim is to bring about gradual change in the way agriculture is done, to stop "the ecological spending of ecological capital necessary for food production".

The 50-Year Farm Bill document includes this paragraph:

Perennialization of the 70 percent of cropland now growing grains has potential to extend the productive life of our soils from the current tens or hundreds of years to thousands or tens of thousands. New perennial crops, like their wild relatives, seem certain to be more resilient to climate change. Without a doubt, they will increase sequestration of carbon. They will reduce the land runoff that is creating coastal dead zones and affecting fisheries, as well as saving and maintaining the quality of scarce surface and ground water. U.S. food security will improve.

Wendell Berry puts it less prosaically in a piece he wrote about the 50-Year Farm Bill published in  The Atlantic last year. As always, his concern is for traditional agricultural communities and sensible practices. 

I have described the need for a farm bill that makes sense of and for agriculture -- not the fiscal and political sense of agriculture, as in the customary five-year farm bills, but the ecological sense without which agricultural sense cannot be made, and without which agriculture cannot be made sustainable.

The program would need the support of the president, the Department of Agriculture, the Congress, non-profits, corporations and citizens.  Five-year farm bills would be incorporated into the plan, and head incrementally toward food security and sustainable farming.  This is, we think, a good idea, but even better would be if, in addition to sensible farm policy, bold political decisions were taken to limit anthropogenic climate change, such as those recently recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change such as capping carbon emissions, limiting the burning of fossil fuels.

Sensible and smart as it clearly is, we're not terribly hopeful that such a 50-Year Farm Bill will be adopted any time soon.  Our politicians don't think long-term because it doesn't pay off in the immediate currency of politics, even if a long-term policy like this one would produce handsome returns in many ways down the road.

We're not hopeful that meaningful carbon caps will become law either, sensible as they are, for much the same reason.  Is the groundswell of interest and research into sustainable agriculture evidence of an incipient revolution in how we do business, though?  We can hope.

We will never see the real answer, however.  What we're doing is leaving the surprises for our descendants, who will have to face the societal consequences of our long-term neglect.

The mad farmer and the World Food Prize

The World Food Prize, also known as the 'Nobel Prize' for Food, was given to its 2013 recipients on October 18.  This year's winners were Mary-Dell Chilton, founder and researcher at Syngenta Biotechnology, Robert Fraley, chief technology officer at Monsanto, and Marc Van Mantagu, founder and chairman of the Institute of Plant Biotechnology Outreach at Ghent University in Belgium.  All of these institutions have been involved in developing genetically modified crops.

The World Food Prize Foundation described the accomplishments of this year's winners this way:

Building upon the scientific discovery of the Double Helix structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in the 1950s, Van Montagu, Chilton, and Fraley each conducted groundbreaking molecular research on how a plant bacterium could be adapted as a tool to insert genes from another organism into plant cells, which could produce new genetic lines with highly favorable traits. 

The revolutionary biotechnology discoveries of these three individuals —each working in separate facilities on two continents—unlocked the key to plant cell transformation using recombinant DNA. Their work led to the development of a host of genetically enhanced crops, which, by 2012, were grown on more than 170 million hectares around the globe by 17.3 million farmers, over 90 percent of whom were small resource-poor farmers in developing countries. 

The combined achievements of the 2013 World Food Prize Laureates, from their work in the laboratory to applying biotechnology innovations in farmers’ fields, have contributed significantly to increasing the quantity and availability of food, and can play a critical role as we face the global challenges of the 21st century of producing more food, in a sustainable way, while confronting an increasingly volatile climate.

Biotech won big this year.

The World Food Prize Foundation was founded by Norman Borlaug, who himself received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work fighting hunger around the world, by using biotechnology of the time to increase agricultural productivity.  Called the father of the Green Revolution, Borlaug led efforts to improve agriculture in non-industrialized countries in the 1940's, 50's and 60's with higher yield grains, hybridized seeds, increased use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and improved irrigation techniques among other biotechnological innovations.  Borlaug is credited with saving a billion lives through his efforts.

Land area used for genetically modified crops by country (1996–2009), in millions of hectares. In 2011, the land area used was 160 million hectares, or 1.6 million square kilometers; Wikipedia

Food production did increase in countries that adopted Green Revolution techniques, particularly India, but, as agricultural journalist and economist Alan Guebert reminds us, there's a difference between productivity and efficiency.  He reports on his recent trip through the farmlands of California in his  Oct 20 Farm and Food File column.

If demographic California now looks like what experts say America will resemble in a generation or two—multi-cultural, multi-lingual, more crowded—then California’s agriculture may soon be America’s farming past.

The reason becomes clearer with every mile you travel in this beautiful, incredibly productive valley: It’s very hard to see any future to any food system that devours so many intensively concentrated resources—water, fuel, artificial fertilizer, chemicals—so America can eat strawberries in February. 

A few days later, a young environmental engineer in Berkeley disagrees when I offer that thesis. “California’s agriculture is too efficient to ever change,” he says.

Now I disagree. You’re confusing efficiency with production, I say. California is highly productive, no argument. But it is inefficient and without water it’s neither. 

This just about sums up the criticism many have of the Green Revolution; productive by not efficient.  Yes, productivity rose but at great cost -- the required energy input to produce food in this highly mechanized, biotech, fossil fuel-reliant way increased rapidly, and the crop output/energy input ratio has decreased over time.  Farmers around the world have become dependent on inputs -- fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, many developed from fossil fuels, and hybrid genetically modified seeds -- which can be prohibitively expensive, and ultimately unsustainable.

The work of this year's Food Prize winners is entirely in keeping with Borlaug's view of how to feed the world.  Indeed, he knew the three of them, and hoped that their efforts would one day be recognized with this prize.  Genetically modified foods remain controversial, of course, but the winners hope that the prize will help quell the opposition.  Chilton was quoted in a USA Today story, saying, "My hope is this will put to rest the misguided opposition" to the crops...  She called genetically modified organisms a "wonderful tool" in the fight against hunger.

But, despite what protesters so often say, genetically modified foods per se are not the problem.  It's the technologies that are required to produce them that are the problem, which are neither efficient nor sustainable, nor progress toward longterm food security.  Much of agribusiness depends on monocropping, which, as we wrote last week (here and here), can be less productive than rotating crops, and the cause of more soil erosion, and increased dependence on toxic chemicals and fossil fuels.  And, the grains produced are annuals rather than perennials which, because they are patented, means that farmers must buy seed every year, and become dependent on suppliers and their herbicides and pesticides, and on conventional agricultural practices.

The three nested systems of sustainability; the economy wholly contained by society, wholly contained by the biophysical environment: Wikipedia

 
Ecological economists, like Herman Daly or Josh Farley (co-authors of "Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications") or Rob Dietz (co-author of "Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources") would say that the problem is even more fundamental than dependence on biotechnology.  The problem extends to how we think about economies and ecosystems in general.  As Richard Heinberg says in his 2011 book "The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality", 18th and 19th century economic philosophers, like Malthus, for example, considered land (or natural resources), labor and capital to be the three essentials of the economy. In this equation, because natural resources are finite, growth must necessarily come to an end at some point.

Then Adam Smith came along, and with him, the idea that the economy could continue to grow and grow.  Heinberg says this is because of the "gradual deletion by economists of land from the theoretical primary ingredients of the economy (increasingly, only labor and capital really mattered, land having been demoted to a subcategory of capital)."  Ecological economics, however, returns to the view that natural capital is finite and in light of this, argues in favor of steady-state no-growth, or even degrowth economics, rather than the pervailing model, the growth economy.

In this view of the world, it could be said that this year's World Food Prize rewards the right people doing the wrong things.  Biotechnology harms the environment, leads to food insecurity, creates the farmer's and thus the consumer's dependence on industries that must attend first to their bottom line, and perpetuates economic practices based on the idea that natural resources are unlimited.  We know this, and we know what should be done instead.  Will it happen?

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We end with a poem by farmer and poet of the land, Wendell Berry. 

The Mad Farmer Revolution

Being a Fragment
of the Natural History of New Eden,
in Homage
To Mr. Ed McClanahan, One of the Locals

The mad farmer, the thirsty one,
went dry. When he had time
he threw a visionary high
lonesome on the holy communion wine.
"It is an awesome event
when an earthen man has drunk
his fill of the blood of a god,"
people said, and got out of his way.
He plowed the churchyard, the
minister's wife, three graveyards
and a golf course. In a parking lot
he planted a forest of little pines.
He sanctified the groves,
dancing at night in the oak shades
with goddesses. He led
a field of corn to creep up
and tassel like an Indian tribe
on the courthouse lawn. Pumpkins
ran out to the ends of their vines
to follow him. Ripe plums
and peaches reached into his pockets.
Flowers sprang up in his tracks
everywhere he stepped. And then
his planter's eye fell on
that parson's fair fine lady
again. "O holy plowman," cried she,
"I am all grown up in weeds.
Pray, bring me back into good tilth."
He tilled her carefully
and laid her by, and she
did bring forth others of her kind,
and others, and some more.
They sowed and reaped till all
the countryside was filled
with farmers and their brides sowing
and reaping. When they died
they became two spirits of the woods.

On their graves were written
these words without sound:
"Here lies Saint Plowman.
Here lies Saint Fertile Ground."

                       Wendell Berry