Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

"Industrial agriculture has brought us mad-cow disease, soil erosion, 
pollution by toxic chemicals, depletion of aquifers, animal abuse, and 
long-distance transportation of food stuffs. This model must be transformed 
into sustainable agriculture."

"We must return to a policy of local food through the family farm."


http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/418620

Eat locally, survive globally

National food policy should give priority to local agriculture over 
globalized agribusiness
Apr 27, 2008 04:30 AM
Thomas Axworthy

Our mothers always told us to eat our greens. Today, the injunction should be 
to eat green.

Eating is many things – a necessity, a pleasure, part of our culture – but it 
is also an environmental act.

Industrial agriculture, the current structure of the North American food 
system, is based on low prices to farmers, high usage of chemicals and 
copious amounts of oil. These factors must be altered if Canada is to have 
plentiful, safe and nutritious food in the future.

With oil now costing $120 (U.S.) a barrel, we are entering an era of peak oil 
prices. Gas is approaching the record of $1.26 (Canadian.) a litre in Ontario 
and many forecast it will reach $1.40 by the summer. This surge in the cost 
of fossil fuels will have profound impacts in a host of areas, not least in 
the way we organize our food supply.

Strawberries in December will soon become a luxury few can afford. It takes 
35 gallons of oil, or the equivalent of a barrel, to raise a steer to go to 
market. Twenty per cent of American petroleum is consumed in the producing 
and moving of food.

Michael Pollan, an award-winning journalist for The New York Times, writes 
that America's "food chain is powered by fossil fuel."

Ingeborg Boyens' book, Another Season's Promise, makes a similar point about 
Canadian farming: "The amount of energy required to produce a calorie of food 
is constantly increasing. At issue is not just the food required to do all 
the mechanical work on the farm: energy is also needed to manufacture 
fertilizer and chemicals at the front end of the process and to transport and 
refrigerate food in the final stages of its delivery to the consumer."

Peak oil is already turning Canadians away from giant SUVs and towards 
compact cars. We need a similar turn away from factory farms and towards 
local food producers.

Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer who has authored more than 40 books 
imploring North America to re-establish a balance between ecology and 
agriculture.

He begins with the sober reflection that the "qualities that make humans the 
most astonishing of all the families of creatures – our intelligence, our 
ambition, and our power – have made us also by far the destructive of all 
creatures ... " Agriculture's mission is to "maintain its people in health, 
and this applies equally to the people who eat and to the people who produce 
the food."

Canada's current system of agriculture is far from healthy. But not so long 
ago farming was at least in harmony with nature. Farms used to waste nothing. 
My grandfather and uncle farmed grain in Saskatchewan but their farm, like 
their neighbours', was mixed with lots of animals to graze, provide manure 
and ultimately food. The sun provided energy to the crops, the animals fed on 
the grass (what we now call free range) and their waste, in turn, provided 
nutrients to plow back into the soil.

In contrast we now have mega-mechanical farms requiring huge amounts of 
capital, chemicals and fossil fuel.

We have not had a national policy to help the family farm since Eugene Whelan 
was minister of agriculture in the 1970s. Ever since, we have had a policy of 
industrial farming, consolidation, agribusiness and globalization. But this 
policy rests on the fatal flaw of cheap energy. That era is over. We must 
return to a policy of local food through the family farm.

The recent 2006 Statistics Canada Census on Agriculture paints an unhappy 
picture of the stress that affects farm families. Canadians pay 12 per cent 
of their national income on food, only half the percentage their parents paid 
in the 1950s. As food prices have gone up, farmers have not benefited. The 
census reveals that inflation has gone up 8.6 per cent for farming inputs 
(machinery, chemicals, etc.) compared to only 1.7 per cent for products sold. 
In 2006, 37 per cent of the farmers in the census had receipts under $25,000. 
Not surprisingly, 71 per cent of these farmers did not make enough to cover 
expenses.

With farmers squeezed by low prices and high costs, half of the farm families 
had one or both partners working off the farm to make ends meet, though 
farming is more than a full-time job. As a result, farmers are leaving their 
profession in droves: in 1991 there were 390,000 Canadians in farming but by 
2006 there were only 327,000. In 1991, there were 78,000 young farmers taking 
over from their parents, in 2006 only 30,000. If the trend continues, who 
will be left to grow the food?

We need a national food policy that relies on the family farm to produce 
local supplies.

School boards should purchase food for their lunch programs from local 
farmers, just as St. Lawrence College in Kingston is doing. Queen's 
University should follow this example.

Agriculture Canada should encourage farmers' markets. Where possible, 
individual consumers should buy direct from the farmer. Regulations should be 
eased to accommodate the 100-mile diet.

Most of all we need an alliance between the city and the farm. Earth Day was 
celebrated last week with marches and park cleanups. A month earlier, Earth 
Hour saw hundreds of thousands of Torontonians turning off the lights. These 
are welcome symbols but we need daily action.

One way is to follow Wendell Berry's advice and "eat responsibly." When we 
purchase food we should ask: "Where does it come from? How was it made? What 
chemicals were used? Methods of slaughter?"

Denmark is experimenting with a barcode that can tell consumers about the 
history of the produce as well as the price. We need the same here.

Industrial agriculture has brought us mad-cow disease, soil erosion, 
pollution by toxic chemicals, depletion of aquifers, animal abuse, and 
long-distance transportation of food stuffs. This model must be transformed 
into sustainable agriculture.

The local food movement is a start. Every day could be Earth Day if we 
started to eat responsibly.

Thomas S. Axworthy is chair for the Study of Democracy at Queen's University.