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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] New (and Old) Ideas for a Better Food System
  • Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:52:31 -0700


New (and Old) Ideas for a Better Food System
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=3276

Solutions for improving the food system: restore seed diversity and native
varieties, steward water, build resiliency, process locally and
cooperatively, treat everyone fairly, get local foods to local outlets.

SEEDS

Restore Seed Diversity and Native Varieties

“My community needs its own food,” says Winona LaDuke, executive
director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project. “We cannot afford the
industrial food system.”

Native American tribes across the country are rediscovering food plants
well adapted to their regions and conducive to good health.

Among those reclaiming native seeds are the people of the White Earth
Indian Reservation in Minnesota, whose White Earth Land Recovery Project
(WELRP) is restoring old, endangered varieties of corn and other crops once
grown by native farmers.

Starting in 2001, the project began collecting traditional varieties of
seeds. These strains are more resilient and don’t need petroleum-based
fertilizer. The group focuses on crops that can thrive in Minnesota’s
short growing season, such as Bear Island Flint corn.

Seed banks and individual growers provided the initial stocks. Working with
seed breeders at North Dakota State University and native farmers, WELRP
grew the plants to produce more seeds and keep the diverse strands alive.

Their work is reconnecting native communities with their food traditions,
which include healthier foods that can prevent diabetes and other
diet-related diseases.

More than 25 percent of native adults in Minnesota have Type 2 diabetes,
according to WELRP. “We are doing this,” LaDuke says, “because we
want to survive.”

WATER

Steward Water

Water is among the most contentious issues in farming, especially in
western states.

New Mexico, where water is scarce, has a tradition of community-controlled
irrigation that is making a comeback. The name for this system, acequia,
refers not only to the network of canals that brings water to farmers
across the Southwest, but also to the traditional community management of
the water.

A few generations ago, nearly everyone in northern New Mexico understood
this traditional form of sustainable irrigation. But the younger generation
was losing that knowledge, says Miguel Santistevan, a teacher and
biologist. In schools, kids were encouraged to learn high-tech skills and
move to the city.

Santistevan left his teaching job and joined the New Mexico Acequia
Association as youth program coordinator. Soon he was bringing kids to
farms and teaching them how to maintain acequias. Students record the work
to post on YouTube and podcast on Acequia Radio.

“By getting them involved in media production, we give them a voice,”
Santistevan says. “But the content is traditional culture, so we’ve
achieved two goals at once.”

SOIL

Build Soil and Resiliency

Across the U.S., about 90 percent of cropland is losing soil at an
unsustainable rate.

In Salina, Kansas, researchers at the Land Institute are working to solve
the problem from the roots up by breeding perennial varieties of grains
that actually build soil. By crossing high-yield annual species like wheat
and sorghum with their wild perennial relatives, the Land Institute aims to
create food crops that don’t require intensive tilling, tending, or
spraying.

“We have to farm the way nature farms,” says Land Institute founder Wes
Jackson, a plant geneticist and fourth-generation farmer. Instead of row
after row of a single species, perennial crops are grown in diverse
mixtures that function like Kansas native wild prairie, naturally repelling
pests and disease while storing water and holding soil and nutrients in
place.

By mimicking ecosystems, farmers encourage and take advantage of the
age-old evolutionary relationships between plants, soil, bacteria, insects,
and animals.

The Land Institute believes ecosystem-modeled agriculture can be applied
anywhere in the world, provided we look to nature’s example for
cultivating plant communities that can also feed people. The result, claims
the Land Institute, is “a wholly new way of farming” that will “make
conservation a consequence of, not an alternative to, food production.”

PROCESSING

Process Locally and Cooperatively

In an area of the country where modern agriculture has devastated rural
communities, the women of the Georgia Southern Alternatives Agriculture
Co-op (SAAC) are independently processing and selling their locally grown
pecans as a way of providing jobs for young women in the community.

In 2006, the co-op began working with the Equal Exchange Domestic Fair
Trade program to package and ship pecans all over the United States. Their
pecans are sold in places like food co-ops.

WORKERS

Treat Everyone Fairly

Food processing workers are at the very bottom of the pay scale. Many are
subject to repetitive stress injury and other on-the-job hazards. Where
unions exist, they improve conditions. But what can consumers do?

In early 2006, Rabbi Morris Allen struck a deal with Agriprocessors, a
large meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, to bring fresh kosher meat to
St. Paul, Minnesota. Two months later, a Jewish newspaper published a
report exposing harsh working conditions at the plant. The report alleged
that money was disappearing from paychecks, safety trainings were conducted
in English for Spanish-speaking employees, workers were underage, and
health coverage was overpriced.

Rabbi Allen felt “personally embarrassed” for putting his faith in the
company. To him, a kosher seal means not just preparing and processing food
according to the ritual tradition but also treating employees in an ethical
way.

In the summer of 2007, Rabbi Allen, the Rabbinical Assembly, and the United
Synagogue of Conservative Judaism launched a program called the Magen
Tzedek, an ethical certification awarded to kosher food companies that meet
high standards in employee health, safety, training, wages, and benefits.

With over 10 million Americans buying kosher products, the Magen Tzedek
assures consumers their food is produced with high integrity. As Rabbi
Allen states, “Keeping kosher is the way in which I demonstrate not only
a concern for my relationship to God and Torah but the Jewish concern for
our relationship to the world in which we live.”

DISTRIBUTION

Get Local Foods to Local Outlets

Small, local farms have a tough time getting products into supermarkets,
which prefer year-round deliveries. After years of puzzling over that
dilemma, the founders of Portland’s Organically Grown Company worked out
solutions. They convinced local farmers to stagger planting schedules. They
purchased seasonal crops from farmers further south as needed. And they
helped farmers showing up with muddy crates of beans to package their goods
more attractively.

Stores loved the fresh vegetables, and the small nonprofit grew into an
employee- and farmer-owned company of 160 staff. In addition to providing
local organic foods, Organically Grown Company runs its warehouse entirely
with wind power, fuels its trucks with biodiesel, and pays its employees
wages that keep them with the company for the long haul.






  • [Livingontheland] New (and Old) Ideas for a Better Food System, Tradingpost, 03/10/2009

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