Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Is long-distance better than local?
http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2007/08/16/eatlocal/index.html?source=fri
end

Attention farmers' market shoppers: Put that heirloom tomato down and rush
to the nearest supermarket.

By seeking local food, you're wantonly spewing carbon into the atmosphere.

That's the message of a budding backlash against the eat-local movement.
The Economist fired a shotgun-style opening salvo last December, peppering
what it called the "ethical foods movement" with a broad-spectrum critique.

Among the claims: organic agriculture consumes more energy than
conventional, and food bought from nearby sources often creates more
greenhouse-gas emissions than food hauled in from long distances. (Here was
my response to that influential piece).

More recently, in a New York Times op-ed piece, the historian James E.
McWilliams sought to debunk the idea that choosing locally produced food
automatically decreases one's carbon footprint. He warns that efforts to
reduce "food-miles" -- the distance between farm and plate -- might
actually support higher carbon emissions at the source. And in Britain, a
debate over whether to withdraw organic certification from African imports
based on their transportation impact has spurred coverage of the issue as
well.

In a sense, these high-profile rebukes are good news: they herald the
arrival of the sustainable-food movement as a pop-culture phenomenon. Just
as you're not really famous until you've been rumored to be gay or on
drugs, a movement hasn't come into its own until it's drawn a formidable
entourage of detractors.

A decade ago, few would have thought to analyze the efforts of eat-local
zealots. But now, farmers' markets are booming, celebrity chefs are proudly
decorating their menus with the names of nearby farms, and a steady stream
of best-sellers is urging us to "come home to eat" (to paraphrase the title
of Gary Paul Nabhan's popular 2001 book).

That surge has earned attention both positive and negative, and landed
local-food advocates in a valuable position. By sniffing out easy
sloganeering, a movement's critics can help it hone and deepen its analysis
-- and reach the next level of acceptance.

Farm-to-Plate Tectonics

So how to respond to these critiques?

First of all, it's important to understand the context in which they come.
The sustainable-food movement's achievements have thus far been largely
cultural. In other words, despite all the attention from celebrity chefs,
best-selling authors, and, ahem, environmental webzine columnists, the vast
bulk of food consumed in this country still travels gargantuan distances,
consumes unspeakable amounts of fossil fuel in its production and
distribution, and leans heavily on poisons and water-polluting artificial
fertilizers.

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Way back in 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense performed what remains the
only comprehensive nationwide study of the average distance food travels
from farm to plate. The study's estimate, 1,200 miles, probably falls well
short of the current mark.

Why? Because food imports are rising at a stunning pace. According to the
USDA, the dollar value of U.S. food imports doubled [Excel] between 1999
and 2006. Over the same period, exports rose nearly as fast.

In short, while we "locavores" strive to minimize food-miles, and critics
chide us for the effort, food continues to zip across the U.S. borders,
gushing in from, and flowing out to, points all across the globe.

And while the sustainable-food movement's power may be causing vapors
within the pages of the Economist and the New York Times op-ed page, Wall
Street hasn't gotten the memo. In the stock exchanges, shares in agribiz
powerhouses Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, John Deere, Smithfield, and
Tyson are all trading at or near all-time highs. That means that the "smart
money" isn't quite as impressed by the rise of buy-local campaigns as
commentators on either side of the food-miles debate are. For unsentimental
investors, the profit prospects for industrialized agriculture, geared for
long-haul distribution, are rosier than ever.

Miles to Go

So food-miles are likely adding up at an accelerating rate, and may well
continue to do so. Is that so bad? Not in the eyes of some. McWilliams
makes the case that we should forget food-miles and focus instead on
lifecycle analysis -- accounting for not just distribution, but also for
energy burned in growing food.

This eminently reasonable insight leads him to a startling claim: that
locally grown food under certain conditions burns more energy, and leads to
higher greenhouse-gas emissions, than food produced thousands of miles
away. Echoing The Economist, McWilliams trots out a recent study claiming
to show that green-minded U.K. consumers should spurn locally grown lamb in
favor of lamb grown in distant New Zealand.

Why? Because according to the study, "lamb raised on New Zealand's
clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced
1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton, while British lamb
produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer
British pastures force farmers to use feed."

To McWilliams, the message is clear: U.K. residents should buy more New
Zealand lamb, and reject local product. But over on Ethicurean, Small-Mart
Revolution author Michael Shuman raises a key point about the study: it
compares conventionally grown, feed-reliant U.K. lamb with lamb raised in
New Zealand, where all lamb is grown on pasture.

But pasture-based organic U.K. lamb exists and is available. Wouldn't
buying that be the greener option for U.K. consumers? The study doesn't
comment on this option -- perhaps because, as Shuman points out, its
authors are funded by New Zealand agribusiness interests that rely on
export markets.

Act Locally, Think Regionally

What often arises in the food-miles debate, I think, is a false dichotomy:
local vs. long distance. But the most attractive model might be a regional
one. McWilliams touches on it, albeit vaguely, with a mention of a
"hub-and-spoke system of food production and distribution." Crucially, he
clings to the notion that Western consumers can continue to commandeer the
globe's bounty perpetually, season be damned.

"Consumers living in developed nations will, for better or worse, always
demand choices beyond what the season has to offer," he declares
confidently, even though such choices have existed all of, say, 40 years.

At any rate, what could such a robust regional system look like?

Take North Carolina, where I live and help run a farm. The state stretches
nearly 400 miles east to west, encompassing relatively cool Appalachian
highlands and blistering-hot eastern lowlands. Orthodox "locavores" in
either region commit themselves to various year-round privations: many
vegetables wilt (or require heavy irrigation) in the eastern summers, and
can't survive cold highland winters. But I like any idea that pushes
local-food advocates beyond arbitrary constructions such as "100-mile"
diets.

Currently, most supermarkets across the state tap into global production
networks that rely on long-haul travel. But ideally, North Carolinians
could eat regionally year-round if we organized to leverage these regional
differences. What if the west provided the bulk of the state's food
production in the summer months, and the east did so in the cold months?

To do so with any reasonable amount of environmental responsibility, we'd
have to reject the temptation to transport food up and down the mountains
in diesel-guzzling, highway-hogging 18-wheelers. Rather, as Rich Pirog of
Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture recently
told me, "If we want regional food systems to be energy-efficient, we have
to reinvest in rail infrastructure."

Pirog, who probably counts as the nation's most rigorous analyst of
food-miles, told me that as recently as 1980, trains accounted for fully
half of food transport in the United States. By 1997, following a period of
low petroleum prices and steady decay of rail systems, just 13 percent of
food traveled on trains. Trucks hauled the other 87 percent.

Thus rebuilding regional food networks -- presumably what McWilliams means
by "strengthen[ing] comparative geographical advantages" -- requires
something that critics of the eat-local movement rarely advocate:
reinvestment in food-production and distribution infrastructure designed
for something beyond maximizing agribusiness profit.

Such a regional conception requires not a rejection of the eat-local ethic,
but rather a broadening of it.

Contra industrial-agriculture dogma -- implicitly echoed by McWilliams and
other eat-local critics -- we'd still have to relearn the skill of thriving
within the physical limits of relatively nearby landscapes. And we'd still
have to think seriously about hard questions posed by Wendell Berry: "What
will nature permit me to do here without damage to herself or to me? What
will nature help me to do here?"