Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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This is from
http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/2007/10/gary-paul-nabha.html

Gary Paul Nabhan: Deepening Our Sense of What is Local and Regional Food

Editor Note:  Gary Paul Nabhan is one of the main reasons that I started this 
multi-year quest to eat local.  His book, Coming Home to Eat, gives us clear 
reasons about why to eat locally grown food.  I was thrilled this week to 
receive a post submission from Dr. Nabhan. This essay is sure to refocus my 
eat local energies, as it may yours, as Dr. Nabhan challenges us to look even 
more deeply into where our food is coming from.

Deepening Our Sense of What Is Local and Regional Food
By: Gary Paul Nabhan, RAFT founder

Now that Time magazine has done a cover feature article on the local foods 
movement and a book on the same topic by bestselling author Barbara 
Kingsolver and her family has climbed up the New York Times top-ten 
non-fiction list, we might want to ask what actually is it that we want to 
promote by using phrases like “Buy Fresh, Buy Local”. I can assure you that 
there will be increasing criticism of the so-called local food movement, 
building on the Hudson Institute’s feeble attempt to discredit it last fall 
in a variety of newspapers, with added absurdities being published in The 
Economist and by the American Farm Bureau. On the other hand, a reputable 
ethicist, Peter Singer, fears in his co-authored book The Way We Eat that 1) 
an emphasis on purchasing foods locally in U.S. communities will disadvantage 
needy producers in foreign countries-- as if India’s producers of Basmati 
rice actually gain much of the retail dollar spent on their rice in the 
U.S.--- or 2) the unethically raised beef or chicken will suddenly take over 
farmers markets and CSAs---as if Conagra and Tyson execs will soon be hanging 
out in overalls selling antibiotic-laced breast meat on Saturdays at their 
local farmers markets. I can predict, however, that more substantive 
critiques will arise, and I, for one, welcome them. It is time that we deepen 
our sense of what we mean by local and regional, offer others better reasons 
as to why these concerns matter, and steadfastly resist any pressure to 
endorse simplistic formulas such as a 100-mile diet or an in-state diet.

Here are some ways we can deepen what we promote by the terms local and 
regional:

1. Local means from a farm, ranch or fishing boat that is locally-owned and 
operated, using the management skills and the labor of local community 
members. A farm that is owned all or in part by an extra-local corporation, 
and which uses migrant workers who live outside the community does not 
benefit its community economically or culturally as much as it should.

2. A regional food is one that has been tied to the traditions of a 
particular landscape or seascape and its cultures for decades if not for 
centuries. If the same mix of mesclun greens is grown in greenhouses across 
the country and sold in every farmers market from Maine to New Mexico, it is 
more like a franchised product (from a seed company) than it is a local or 
regional food. Yes it may be produced five miles from your home and thereby 
reduce food miles, but its seeds are not saved and adapted to local or 
regional conditions, they are bought from afar every year.

3. The miles a food travels (“food miles”) must be placed in the size and 
volume of the mode of transport, its source of fuel, and its frequency of 
travel. Using biodiesel in a larger truck may be more efficient, and leave 
less of a carbon footprint than using leaded gas in an old clunker. One in 
every five kilocalories in the American food production and delivery system 
now underwrites transportation, as well as packaging and cooling while in 
transit, so this will be an increasingly important issue to solve by using 
alternative fuels, cost-efficient volumes, and ensuring that vehicles holding 
their full capacity in both directions, perhaps by carrying compost back to 
farms where the vegetables originated.

4. On farm energy and water use matter. If a farm near Tucson Arizona is 
irrigated from a canal that transports Colorado River water hundreds of miles 
(and at high ecological cost to wild riverine species), or if it uses fossil 
groundwater set down during the Pleistocene pumped by fossil fuel set down in 
Iran during the Pennsylvanian era, what is to be gained by promoting its food?

5. Other on-farm inputs matter just as much. Where are the sources of hay for 
livestock, compost for garden crops or nitrogen for field crops?
They should be locally if not regionally-sourced. Why call lamb 
locally-produced in Idaho when its flock has wintered part of the year in 
California and its hay comes in from southern Colorado?

6. Fair-trade with other cultures, localities and regions is fair game. 
Circumvent the globalized economy for the items you truly need from other 
regions by establishing fair-trade exchanges. It is not that we don’t care 
about farmers and ranchers elsewhere, we simply don’t wish to see middlemen 
gaining more of each consumer dollar than the producers do. Producers 
inevitably plow money back into their communities and lands, intermediaries 
seldom do.

7. Invest in the foods unique to your region that cannot or should not be 
grown anywhere else. The attached RAFT map (pdf) reminds us of ancient food 
traditions based on climate, soil and culture, involving both native and 
immigrant foods that have adapted and been integrated into particular places. 
Because the U.S. currently lacks the geographic indicators such as 
denominations of origin that reinforce the links between place, culture and 
genetics of a particular food, these place-based foods are truly threatened 
by globalization. Invest in them and their original stewards.
###

About the author

Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan is outgoing Director of the Center for Sustainable 
Environments at Northern Arizona University, and a founder of Native 
Seeds/SEARCH and the Renewing America’s Food Traditions collaborative based 
at Slow Food USA. His twenty books include Gathering the Desert, Coming Home 
to Eat, and Why Some Like It Hot. This first appeared on his website, 
www.garynabhan.com. He will have three new books out in 2008, including Where 
Our Food Comes From by Island Press.