Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

 Published on Thursday, January 24, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Lawn to Farm: Suburbia’s Silver Lining
by Wylie Harris
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/23/6584/

I look at the empty countryside around our farm and can’t help but wish
it were as thick with people as when my grandparents made a living here.
Until recently, though, the kindest name the rest of the world had for this
wish was “nostalgia.”

Back then, leaving the farm made sense. The economy was growing on an
energy-dense broth of cheap fossil fuels. The energy in those fuels
replaced that from the muscles of farm people and their animals. Today one
person can grow food for more than a hundred.

A century ago, almost 40 percent of the United States population worked on
farms. But with industrialization, millions of farm folk, their labor
cheapened, headed to the city for better wages. That tide continued until
fewer than 2 million farmers — less than 1 percent of the country’s
population — remain today.

Now, though, the seemingly limitless reserves of petroleum that fueled the
past century’s exodus from the farm are about half gone. From here on,
fossil fuels — and all the everyday essentials that depend on them, like
transportation and food — will grow increasingly costly.

Without some miraculous new energy source, muscle power could soon again be
a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels for growing food. Blunt economic
pragmatism seems set to out-shout nostalgia in the call to put more farmers
on the land.

Just how many more farmers would it take to cure farming’s fossil fuel
habit? Lots, according to farmer and writer Sharon Astyk and “Oil
Depletion Protocol” author Richard Heinberg, both leading activists for
facing up to life after world oil production peaks. They estimate that
without cheap fossil fuels, we would need 50 million new farmers. That’s
one farmer for every two households in the United States, 25 times more
than there are now.

This isn’t a move-to-the-boonies-or-starve ultimatum. In fact, many
people are ideally positioned to become farmers right where they are —
it’s the silver lining to suburban sprawl.

Suburbia occupies vast swaths of former prime U.S. farmland. NASA’s
ecological forecasting research group reports that the people living there
already water about 30 million acres of lawn, three times the land planted
in irrigated corn.

Those lawns average somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of an acre.
Authorities like gardening guru John Jeavons and “The Contrary Farmer”
author Gene Logsdon say that’s ample land for growing a substantial
portion of a family’s food.

This isn’t to say that the 50 million farmers-to-be should grow all their
own food, nor that the entire country’s food supply can come from former
lawns, parks and golf courses.

Rather, it’s to point out that growing as much of one’s own food as
possible can be a cornerstone of sound household finance, and that the
necessary land and water are already in the same places as many of the
people who now participate only in the demand side of agriculture.

The most effective tactics for making farmers out of more of us are local:
convincing homeowner associations that vegetable gardens look as nice as
lawns, zoning boards that chickens belong in back yards, and state health
agencies that bread baked in home kitchens for sale to neighbors isn’t
any likelier to hurt anybody than Wonder Bread.

Rethinking what we mean by “farmer” is also important. The necessary
transition is as much mental as political. “Farmers” who plow thousands
of acres with gigantic diesel-guzzling tractors and sell corn by the bushel
for their entire income aren’t much use in an age of expensive energy.

On the other hand, “farmers” who grow substantial amounts of food for
their families and perhaps also for sale to neighbors, as primary income or
not, are far better equipped to weather a forced fossil-fuel fast. This is
the kind of farmer many of us are already within a hoe handle’s reach of
becoming, and perhaps with less effort than we realize.

An agrarian nation isn’t just a nostalgic wish after all. It’s
insurance we can’t afford to live without.

Wylie Harris ranches with his family in Cooke County, Texas, north of Fort
Worth. A former W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy fellow, he
wrote this comment for the Land Institute’s Prairie Writers Circle,
Salina, Kan.