Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>]

THIS is the most important subject.

Organic Goes Beyond the Pale Green
Source Grist Magazine
URL: http://www.greenbiz.com/news/reviews_third.cfm?NewsID=26008
Activists and small-scale farmers are going "beyond organic" to push
local foods. By Michelle Nijhuis

Organic food has hit the big time. The Whole Foods Market chain, the
largest natural-foods retailer in the world, boasts 145 stores
throughout North America; its leading competitor, Wild Oats, has 101
stores in 25 states and Canada. Last year, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture put in place a set of national standards for organic food,
smoothing the way for organic processors who buy ingredients from
multiple states. Organic products -- fresh produce, frozen pizzas, and
everything in between -- are now part of a multi-billion-dollar industry
that's growing by 20% to 25% each year.

But if you're reading this over an organic banana or a pesticide-free
seaweed salad, don't sigh with satisfaction just yet. On average, 10
calories of fossil-fuel energy are used in producing, processing,
transporting, and preparing every calorie of food we consume in the
United States, according to studies by David Pimentel of Cornell
University. While organic farming methods can save some energy in the
production department, they don't have the same healthy effect on
transportation; organic or not, oranges burn a lot of fuel on their way
to Minneapolis.

Some critics say there's only one way for shoppers, restaurants, and
grocery stores to correct this massive resource drain: Go one step
"beyond organic" and buy fresh, pesticide-free food from local growers.


Eliot Coleman, who has raised produce in Maine for more than three
decades, sells all of his fruits and vegetables within 25 miles of his
year-round farm. He says the dominant, USDA-endorsed definition of
organic doesn't fully describe what he does. "It just disavows the
negatives -- pesticides and chemicals -- without embracing the
positives," he says. Coleman argues that shopping locally not only
conserves natural resources, but also helps protect small-scale farms
like his.

Coleman is part of a loose network of farmers, consumers, and advocacy
groups that is trying to push organic agriculture a step closer to
sustainability. These activists use a variety of labels to describe what
they're promoting -- beyond-organic food, authentic food, even slow food
-- but they're all engaged in the surprisingly difficult task of getting
local food on local tables.

"Let's figure out how to serve the local community so that foods are
not shipped such long distances," California farmer and author Michael
Ableman said in the recent documentary film "Beyond Organic." "Let's
create an energy revolution in agriculture."

Too Far Out

Locally grown food of all sorts used to be easy to get: You simply went
to the nearest store and bought it. But since World War II, most small,
diverse farms have given way to bigger, more specialized industrial
enterprises. These larger growers, who benefit from economies of scale,
can afford to ship their products throughout the country and even around
the world -- while still charging less than smaller farmers.

The result? The food at your neighborhood supermarket comes from
further and further away. One analysis of USDA data calculated that the
average pound of produce in a Maryland market had traveled 1,685 miles;
a recent report from the Worldwatch Institute estimated that food in the
United States travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from farm to table.


Joan Gussow, a former professor of nutrition at Columbia University,
was one of the first scholars to speak out about the environmental costs
of this trend. Gussow, who helped develop the federal organic standards,
is the author of several books, including "This Organic Life:
Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader." She's been preaching the
local-food gospel for more than 25 years. "When I started writing and
talking about local food, I was thought of as a little nuts," she says.
"Back then, 'progress' meant eating anything you wanted, whenever you
wanted to."

Times have changed, at least a little. Small farmers in the United
States are still struggling for survival, but their local marketing
options have begun to expand again. Back in 1984, Massachusetts farmer
Robyn Van En helped bring the concept of community-supported agriculture
from Europe to the United States. CSA farmers, who usually use organic
methods but don't necessarily have federal organic certification, sell
"shares" of their harvest to local consumers, collecting up-front
payments that help cover the costs of planting and raising the produce.
Shareholders then pick up produce at regular times throughout the
growing season.

Today, more than 1,000 CSAs are active throughout the country, and
they're operating in some unexpected places. Just Food, a nonprofit
organization in New York City, has helped connect CSA farmers in the
region with urban dwellers, making fresh CSA produce available at 28
locations in four boroughs. Thanks in part to the group's efforts,
low-income New Yorkers can now use food stamps for their CSA fees; they
can also pay on a sliding scale, or in installments throughout the
season.

Farmers' markets, which provide another way for small farmers to reach
their customers directly, are booming as well. The USDA estimates that
the number of markets increased 79% from 1994 to 2002, with 3,100
operating today. Regional farmers' groups frequently publish directories
to encourage on-farm sales, and one organization, LocalHarvest, has set
up a nationwide Internet directory of small farmers and other local-food
sources.

Yet it's not easy for these go-local efforts to draw customers away
from the convenience (and, often, the rock-bottom prices) of one-stop
shopping. Farming advocacy groups, such as the Community Alliance with
Family Farmers in Davis, Calif., are trying to encourage individuals and
retailers to buy local. With the help of a national group, FoodRoutes,
the alliance has developed a stylish "Buy Fresh, Buy Local" label for
products from California's central coast. Forty-five farmers have signed
up for the year-old program, and a Santa Cruz-based chain of
natural-food stores has agreed to buy and market the labeled products.
Alliance regional coordinator Jered Lawson says his group plans to
promote local labels in other parts of California and hopes to convince
more restaurants and catering businesses to jump on the fresh-and-local
bandwagon. Similar efforts are underway in other states, including Iowa,
Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon.

Such buy-local campaigns have some unexpectedly chic supporters. The
Chefs Collaborative, cofounded in 1993 by fresh-food champion Alice
Waters (the owner and executive chef of Chez Panisse Restaurant and Cafe
in Berkeley, Calif.) and several colleagues, promotes the use of local
and organic ingredients in fine cuisine and elsewhere. The international
Slow Food movement, which boasts 65,000 members, celebrates the gourmet
pleasures of fresh and local food and works to protect what it calls an
"ark" of rare crop varieties and other "endangered tastes."

Small Talk

But big retailers -- the real meat of the food market -- remain out of
reach for many small farmers. Chris Fullerton, manager of the 25-member
Tuscarora Organic Growers Cooperative in Pennsylvania, says larger
out-of-state growers can often offer lower prices and longer-lasting
supplies to supermarket customers. "We might have a four or five week
season while California has a 20 to 30 week season," he says. "[Prices]
can be high some of the year and low some of the year, and [retailers
can] average things out. But if we're in the market when California
decides to play lowball, we don't have the same kind of flexibility."
What's more, he says, big retailers often require their suppliers to
carry liability-insurance policies that are prohibitively expensive for
smaller growers.

Local farmers who want to do big business can look to entrepreneurs
like Michael Rozyne for help. Rozyne, one of the founders of the Equal
Exchange fair-trade coffee company, is getting local produce on
supermarket shelves through a nonprofit marketing group called Red
Tomato. The group is finding that the unique characteristics of local
food -- freshness and variety -- appeal to supermarket shoppers as well
as health-food-store patrons.

Farmers can also find encouragement in activists like Adriane Dellorco,
a recent graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, who started campaigning
for local-food options in the campus dining service during her first
year. After spending much of her college career shuttling between
Oberlin officials, dining-service managers, and local growers, she got
results. "It takes years to make it happen," she sighs. But her efforts
paid off: Oberlin's college dining service now channels slightly more
than 5% of its food budget toward local farms and distributors, about a
third of which goes toward organic products. A few other schools are
following suit: This year, Waters helped begin a local-food initiative
at a Yale University residence hall.

These small but significant victories are bringing hope -- and a little
bit of cold, hard cash -- to growers who sell their produce close to
home. But organic products, local or not, still account for only 1% to
2% of total food sales in the United States. "This movement is still at
the level of a good idea," says Gussow. "A lot of people are now doing
it, and it's exciting to think about the land and the people. But it
hasn't yet reached the point of people saying, 'You know, we don't have
any choice. If we don't do something, we're not going to have any local
agriculture left.'"

---------
This article has been reprinted courtesy of Grist Magazine. It was
first printed in November 2003.