Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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"Study after study indicates small scale, integrated organic/low input
sustainable production can produce more food, of higher nutritional value
locally, where it is needed."

Published on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
A Change We Can Believe In - Dumping Industrial Agriculture
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/12/30-8
by Jim Goodman

As 2009 approaches, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) notes nearly a billion people a day go hungry worldwide. While India
supplies Switzerland with 80% of its wheat, 350 million Indians are
food-insecure. Rice prices have nearly tripled since early 2007 because,
according to The International Rice Research Institute, rice-growing land
is being lost to industrialization, urbanization and shifts to grain crops
for animal feed.

Yet, according to FAO statistics, world food supplies have kept pace with
population growth. There is enough food to adequately feed everyone.
Clearly, root causes of the food crisis lie in politics, problems with food
distribution, poverty and a failure of the industrial food system to
deliver its promises.

Dr. Bob Watson, chief scientist for the Department of Environment, Food and
Rural Affairs in the UK, places the blame for the food price spikes on
several factors; grain being shifted to animal feed, drought, increased use
of grains for biofuels and speculation in food crops. While proponents
assert that industrial agriculture is the only hope to end the food crisis,
it appears that industrial agriculture is *causing* the food crisis.

A study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and
Technology for Development (IAASTD) found, that as industrial farming
practices are adopted in countries like India, small farmers and landless
peasants are forced off the land. Hundreds of vegetables and weeds that
were part of the traditional diet are wiped out by mono-cultures and
herbicides used on the Genetically Modified (GM) crops. Thus, as Margaret
Visser tells us, more rice and wheat produced in India really meant less
food and less nutrition.

In 1995 Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro addressed the Society of Environmental
Journalists stating "The commercial industrial technologies (the Green
Revolution) that are used in agriculture today to feed the world... are not
inherently sustainable." Even Shapiro, was admitting the Green Revolution
would fail. As George Kent notes in /The Political Economy of Hunger/, "the
benefits of Green Revolution yields went into the mouths of rich world
denizens, in the form of meat and processed foods"

IAASTD concluded that small-scale farmers in diverse ecosystems should be
the focus of efforts to get better quality food in the right places.
Farmers need better access to knowledge, technology and credit, but was
biotechnology *the *technology ? Watson told the UK Daily Mail "Are
transgenics the simple answer to hunger and poverty? I would argue, no."

Study after study indicates small scale, integrated organic/low input
sustainable production can produce more food, of higher nutritional value
locally, where it is needed.

A 15 year study at the Rodale Institute showed similar yields for
conventionally raised vs. organic corn and soy, with soil fertility being
consistently higher in the organic systems.

The Broadbalk study in the UK, ongoing for over 150 years, shows higher
yields in integrated organic systems over conventional systems with soil
fertility remarkably in the organic system.

In /This Organic Life/, Joan Dye Gussow notes that prior to World War II,
even with its harsh climate, Montana produced 70% of its own food,
including fruit. Sustainably, organically on small farms.

The advantage of integrated organic and sustainable systems is even more
apparent in the Global South where most farms are an acre or less. While
"yield" per acre can be higher on large conventional farms, "total output"
per acre, the sum of everything the farmer produces, is according to Peter
Rosset in /The Ecologist/, far higher on small farms. More food, more
nutrition, more animal feed.

Gardeners are familiar with the Three Sisters, corn, beans and squash,
three food crops that thrive together. This system of intercropping, has
long been practiced by small scale indigenous farmers. Integrating
livestock, manure and crop rotation makes the system even more productive
in terms of food per acre.

According to Rosset, economists at the World Bank realize that
redistribution of land to small farmers would promote greater food
production, yet due to corporate and political pressure, the industrial
farming model is promoted as the standard that will "feed the world."
Helena Norberg-Hodge notes that the industrial food system became dominated
by the "need for corporate profits, not the need to feed the global
population".

Industrial farming has been an abysmal failure at feeding the world. The
best hope, according to the IAASTD report, long term research and countless
generations of indigenous farmers, lies with "small scale farmers in
diverse eco-systems".

As for the US, we need sensible food policy; less grain for animals, more
home and community gardens, farmer owned grain reserves, energy policy that
does not use food for fuel and an end to food price speculation. That is a
"Change we can believe in".
Jim Goodman, his wife Rebecca and brother Francis run a 45-cow organic
dairy and direct market beef farm in SW Wisconsin. His farming roots trace
back to his great-grandfathers immigration from Ireland during the famine
and the farms original purchase in 1848. A farm activist, Jim credits over
150 years of failed farm and social policy with his motivation to advocate
for a farmer controlled consumer oriented food system. Jim currently serves
on the policy advisory boards for the Center for Food Safety and the
Organic Consumers Association, and is board president of the Midwest
Organic Services Association.