Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Change We Can Stomach
by Dan Barber
New York Times
Sunday, May 11, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/opinion/11barber.htm

COOKING, like farming, for all its down-home community spirit, is
essentially a solitary craft. But lately it's feeling more like a lonely
burden. Finding guilt-free food for our menus - food that¹s clean, green and
humane - is about as easy as securing a housing loan. And we're suddenly
paying more - 75 percent more in the last six years - to stock our pantries.
Around the world, from Cairo to Port-au-Prince, increases in food prices
have governments facing riots born of shortages and hunger. It's enough to
make you want to toss in the toque.

But here's the good news: if you're a chef, or an eater who cares about
where your food comes from (and there are a lot of you out there), we can
have a hand in making food for the future downright delicious.

Farming has the potential to go through the greatest upheaval since the
Green Revolution, bringing harvests that are more healthful, sustainable
and, yes, even more flavorful. The change is being pushed along by market
forces that influence how our farmers farm.

Until now, food production has been controlled by Big Agriculture, with its
macho fixation on "average tonnage" and "record harvests."² But there's a
cost to its breadbasket-to-the-world bragging rights. Like those big
Industrial Age factories that once billowed black smoke, American
agriculture is mired in a mind-set that relies on capital, chemistry and
machines. Food production is dependent on oil, in the form of fertilizers
and pesticides, in the distances produce travels from farm to plate and in
the energy it takes to process it.

For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have claimed that this is
several kinds of madness. But industrial agriculture has simply responded
that if we're feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how terrible
can our food system be?

Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than
$120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small
and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and
best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren't as
reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and
fertilizer.

In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in
the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets
$39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with
sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution,
and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, it¹s
no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it¹s grown.

The high cost of oil alone will not be enough to reform American
agriculture, however. As long as agricultural companies exploit the poor and
extract labor from them at slave wages, and as long as they aren't required
to pay the price for the pollution they so brazenly produce, their system
will stay afloat. If financially pinched Americans opt for the cheapest (and
the least healthful) foods rather than cook their own, the food industry
will continue to reach for the lowest common denominator.

But it is possible to nudge the revolution along - for instance, by changing
how we measure the value of food. If we stop calculating the cost per
quantity and begin considering the cost per nutrient value, the demand for
higher-quality food would rise.

Organic fruits and vegetables contain 40 percent more nutrients than their
chemical-fed counterparts. And animals raised on pasture provide us with
meat and dairy products containing more beta carotene and at least three
times as much C.L.A. (conjugated linoleic acid, shown in animal studies to
reduce the risk of cancer) than those raised on grain.

Where good nutrition goes, flavor tends to follow. Chefs are the first to
admit that an impossibly sweet, flavor-filled carrot has nothing to do with
our work. It has to do with growing the right seed in healthy, nutrient-rich
soil.

Increasingly we can see the wisdom of diversified farming operations, where
there are built-in relationships among plants and animals. A dairy farm can
provide manure for a neighboring potato farm, for example, which can in turn
offer potato scraps as extra feed for the herd. When crops and livestock are
judiciously mixed, agriculture wisely mimics nature.

To encourage small, diversified farms is not to make a nostalgic bid to
revert to the agrarian ways of our ancestors. It is to look toward the
future, leapfrogging past the age of heavy machinery and pollution, to farms
that take advantage of the sun¹s free energy and use the waste of one
species as food for another.

Chefs can help move our food system into the future by continuing to demand
the most flavorful food. Our support of the local food movement is an
important example of this approach, but it's not enough. As demand for
fresh, local food rises, we cannot continue to rely entirely on farmers'
markets. Asking every farmer to plant, harvest, drive his pickup truck to a
market and sell his goods there is like asking me to cook, take
reservations, serve and wash the dishes.

We now need to support a system of well-coordinated regional farm networks,
each suited to the food it can best grow. Farmers organized into marketing
networks that can promote their common brands (like the Organic Valley
Family of Farms in the Midwest) can ease the economic and ecological burden
of food production and transportation. They can also distribute their
products to new markets, including poor communities that have relied mainly
on food from convenience stores.

Similar networks could also operate in the countries that are now
experiencing food shortages. For years, the United States has flooded the
world with food exports, displacing small farmers and disrupting domestic
markets. As escalating food prices threaten an additional 100 million people
with hunger, a new concept of humanitarian aid is required. Local farming
efforts focused on conserving natural resources and biodiversity are
essential to improving food security in developing countries, as a report
just published by the International Assessment of Agriculture Science and
Technology for Development has concluded. We must build on these tenets,
providing financial and technical assistance to small farmers across the
world.

But regional systems will work only if there is enough small-scale farming
going on to make them viable. With a less energy-intensive food system in
place, we will need more muscle power devoted to food production, and more
people on the farm. (The need is especially urgent when you consider that
the average age of today's American farmer is over 55.) In order to move
gracefully into a post-industrial agriculture economy, we also need to
rethink how we educate the people who will grow our food. Land-grant
universities and agricultural schools, dependent on financing from
agribusiness, focus on maximum extraction from the land - take more, sell
more, waste more.

Leave our agricultural future to chefs and anyone who takes food and cooking
seriously. We never bought into the "bigger is better" mantra, not because
it left us too dependent on oil, but because it never produced anything
really good to eat. Truly great cooking - not faddish 1.5-pound rib-eye
steaks with butter sauce, but food that has evolved from the world¹s
thriving peasant cuisines - is based on the correspondence of good farming
to a healthy environment and good nutrition. It's never been any other way,
and we should be grateful. The future belongs to the gourmet.

Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone
Barns.