Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

".. oil is pushing a hundred dollars a barrel, and there’s no telling
where the price will jump the next time there’s a catastrophe to
intensify the growing scarcity. Imported food, whether from California or
across the ocean, is just going to get more expensive. The sooner we start
providing for ourselves, the better off we’ll be."

FUTURE POSSIBLE?
November 10th, 2007
http://brothermartin.wordpress.com/

I just returned from a two-week swing through New England, and overall it
was a very encouraging experience. I lived in Vermont for several years in
the nineties, and in many ways felt as if I had left the US for a saner
country. It was very refreshing to visit again and find a place where
sanity and counterculture have spread and grown, rather than eroding and
fragmenting as they seem to have done here in the south. And no, it
wasn’t ”like I’d died and gone to heaven.” There were plenty of
problems still to solve, both personal and political, everywhere I went.
But it felt like there was the will and intelligence and infrastructure to
do it. Let me give you some examples.

There are nearly 600 organic farmers in Vermont, according to the state’s
organic growers’ association. Considering the small size of Vermont, this
means that organic farmers are pretty ubiquitous. Not quite as ubiquitous
as dairy farms—there are about 1400 of those left, down from a 1947 peak
of 11,000. But gee, that’s one organic farmer for every thousand
Vermonters, and about one dairy farm for every four hundred and thirty
people. If we had a similar proportion here in Tennessee, there would be
about five hundred organic farms and over a thousand dairy farms just in
the Nashville area alone. That sure would be a different Nashville,
wouldn’t it?

These aren’t just fruit and vegetable farms. There are meat and field
crop producers, as well as some overlap between the organic farm numbers
and the dairy farm numbers, so we are talking about the possibility of a
whole diet from locally grownorganic food—yes, even homegrown sweets,
because there are honey producers and maple tappers aplenty up in the
northeast woods. And there are cafes and co-op grocery stores in the small
towns, vibrant little community centers where people eat and shop and meet
their neighbors and talk and argue and plan and create.

Not all of this food gets consumed locally. In fact, most of it gets
shipped down to Boswash, the Boston-Washington urban conglomerate, where
the money is. But the Vermonters would like to keep more of their produce
at home, and they are working on ways to keep it local, and benefit their
communities as they do. The organic farmers have teamed up with a
food-policy think tank called Foodworks and Shelburne Farms, an
environmental education center, to create FEED, “Food Education Every
Day,” an organization which works to get local school and other
institutional cafeterias to use as much local food as possible, and to
educate schoolkids about the many advantages to locally grown food. They
have gotten the state legislature on board, and so there are grants and
incentive programs, but the program practically sells itself. I should add
that it’s not a ”top down” affair; each school district, in a council
of teachers, administrators, farmers, and cooks, determines its own
priorities.

They have had to add one step to make it work better, but that step adds
value for everyone. In Vermont, the garden season and the school season
barely overlap, and everyone involved quickly realized that having a way to
process and preserve food would make it more available. So, voila!
Small-scale canning and processing has become part of the mix, adding value
and local employment. Tomatoes and peppers become salsa or tomato sauce;
carrots are made into carrot sticks, bagged, and stored; apples are sliced
by the bushel—don’t ask me why, but they found out that most kids will
eat more apples if they are sliced first! Processing also enables them to
use produce that is not aesthetically pleasing enough to sell fresh.

And then there are the in-school educational programs—soup making
contests, with the kids as judges; farm visits where kids get to pick their
own carrots, blueberries, apples, or whatever; school cafeteria staff, long
the subject of bad jokes, get to do something creative, nutritious, local,
and tasty. It’s a win/win situation, and it’s growing. Vermonters did
not seem overly worried about political, economic, or even ecological
collapse.

I’m glad to know they’re up there and doing so well. I hope their
inspiration spreads. We could use some of that energy down here, where
locally grown food, organic or not, is still a novelty, and the organic
food stores depend on trucks from California and Florida to stock not just
their produce, meat, and dairy departments, but all the other grocery
shelves as well. Five hundred organic producers in the Nashville area? What
have we got now, about five?

What would it take to start growing our growers to the point where we might
imagine local farmers providing a measurable share of the food that is
eaten in middle Tennessee? First of all, we have to look at our tax codes
and land valuation and zoning policies, which make it much more profitable
to subdivide land and sell it than to grow food on it. Zoning has to
recognize that small-scale food production is a legitimate use of one’s
home, although I think there should be some common-sense limits to this!
Then there are infrastructure questions—how to help people get into
farming, I think the way to do this is to find people who can take on a
backyard garden with a fork and a hoe and feed their neighborhood, then
help them graduate to a half-acre or an acre and feed their community with
occasional help from teenagers, retirees, or people who want some healthy
exercise after sitting at a desk all week. And of course there are weather
questions. We don’t yet know if last year’s stunning heat and drought
was a terrible anomaly, or the beginning of a new pattern. Growers will
have to learn to be flexible; we do live in a climate in which, with a
little simple protection, salad vegetables and leafy greens will produce
all winter, and that’s likely to keep on being the case, no matter what
our summers become.

Meanwhile, oil is pushing a hundred dollars a barrel, and there’s no
telling where the price will jump the next time there’s a catastrophe to
intensify the growing scarcity. Imported food, whether from California or
across the ocean, is just going to get more expensive. The sooner we start
providing for ourselves, the better off we’ll be.