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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008
  • Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:09:30 -0700


I'm going to tear into this. Anyone else?

Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008
http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008

Our industrial food system is rotten to the core. Heirloom arugula won't save
us. Here's what will.

a couple years back, in a wheat field outside the town of Reardan,
Washington, Fred Fleming spent an afternoon showing me just how hard it's
gotten to save the world. After decades as an unrepentant industrial farmer,
the tall 59-year-old realized that his standard practices were promoting
erosion so severe that it was robbing him of several tons of soil per acre
per year—his most important asset. So in 2000, he began to experiment with a
gentler planting method known as no-till. While traditional farmers plow
their fields after each harvest, exposing the soil for easy replanting,
Fleming leaves his soil and crop residue intact and uses a special machine to
poke the seeds through the residue and into the soil.

The results aren't pretty: In winter, when his neighbors' fields are neat
brown squares, Fleming's looks like a bedraggled lawn. But by leaving the
stalks and chaff on the field, Fleming has dramatically reduced erosion
without hurting his wheat yields. He has, in other words, figured out how to
cut one of the more egregious external costs of farming while maintaining the
high output necessary to feed a growing world—thus providing a glimpse of
what a new, more sustainable food system might look like.

But there's a catch. Because Fleming doesn't till his soil, his fields are
gradually invaded by weeds, which he controls with "judicious" amounts of
Roundup, the Monsanto herbicide that has become an icon of unsustainable
agribusiness. Fleming defends his approach: Because his herbicide dosages are
small, and because he controls erosion, the total volume of "farm chemistry,"
as he calls it, that leaches from his fields each year is far less than that
from a conventional wheat operation. None­theless, even judicious chemical
use means Fleming can't charge the organic price premium or appeal to many of
the conscientious shoppers who are supposed to be leading the food
revolution. At a recent conference on alternative farming, Fleming says, the
organic farmers he met were "polite—but they definitely gave me the cold
shoulder."

That a recovering industrial farmer can't get respect from the alternative
food crowd may seem trivial, but Fleming's experience cuts to the very heart
of the debate over how to fix our food system. Nearly everyone agrees that we
need new methods that produce more higher-quality calories using fewer
resources, such as water or energy, and accruing fewer "externals," such as
pollution or unfair labor practices. Where the consensus fails is over what
should replace the bad old industrial system. It's not that we lack
enthusiasm—activist foodies represent one of the most potent market forces on
the planet. Unfortunately, a lot of that conscientious buying power is
directed toward conceptions of sustainable food that may be out of date.

Think about it. When most of us imagine what a sustainable food economy might
look like, chances are we picture a variation on something that already
exists—such as organic farming, or a network of local farms and farmers
markets, or urban pea patches—only on a much larger scale. The future of
food, in other words, will be built from ideas and models that are familiar,
relatively simple, and easily distilled into a buying decision: Look for the
right label, and you're done.

But that's not the reality. Many of the familiar models don't work well on
the scale required to feed billions of people. Or they focus too narrowly on
one issue (salad greens that are organic but picked by exploited workers). Or
they work only in limited circumstances. (A $4 heirloom tomato is hardly
going to save the world.)

Such problems aren't exactly news. Organizations such as the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation (which despite its namesake is a real leader in food reform) have
long insisted that truly sustainable food must be not just ecologically
benign, but also nutritious, produced without injustice, and affordable. And
yet, because concepts like local or organic dominate the alternative food
sector, there is little room left for alternative models, such as Fred
Fleming's, that might begin to bridge the gap between where our food system
is today and where it needs to be.

And how big is that gap? Using the definition of sustainability above, about
2 percent of the food purchased in the United States qualifies. Put another
way, we're going to need not only new methods for producing food, but a whole
new set of assumptions about what sustainability really means.

food is not simple. To make it, you have to balance myriad variables—soil,
water, and nutrients, of course, but also various social, political, and
economic realities. But because our consumer culture favors fixes that are
fast and easy, our approaches toward food advocacy have been built around one
or two dimensions of production, such as reducing energy use or eliminating
pesticides, while overlooking factors that are harder to define (and ditto to
market), such as worker safety.

Consider our love affair with food miles. In theory, locally grown foods have
traveled shorter distances and thus represent less fuel use and lower carbon
emissions—their resource footprint is smaller. And yet, for all the benefits
of a local diet, eating locally doesn't always translate into more
sustainability. Because the typical farmers market is supplied by dozens of
different farms, each transporting its crops in a separate van or truck, a
20-pound shopping basket of locally grown produce might actually represent a
larger carbon footprint than the same volume of produce purchased at a chain
retailer, which gets its produce en masse, via large trucks.

And for all our focus on the cost of moving food, transportation accounts for
barely one-tenth of a food product's greenhouse gas emissions. Far more
significant is how the food was produced—its so-called resource intensity.
Certain foods, like meat and cheese, suck up so many resources regardless of
where they're produced (a pound of conventional grain-fed beef requires
nearly a gallon of fuel and 5,169 gallons of water) that you can shrink your
footprint far more by changing what you eat, rather than where the food came
from. According to a 2008 report from Carnegie Mellon University, going meat-
and dairyless one day a week is more environmentally beneficial than eating
locally every single day.

Certainly, we can broaden concepts like food miles into more practical,
ecologically honest terms. To that end, the British retail chain Tesco is
testing a new labeling system that discloses a product's life-cycle carbon
emissions in a per-serving figure. But even that focuses too much on a
specific outcome, says Fred Kirschenmann, former director of the Leopold
Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Real sustainability, he argues, is
defined not by a food system's capacity to ensure happy workers or organic
lima beans, but by whether the food system can sustain itself—that is, keep
going, indefinitely, in a world of finite resources. A truly sustainable food
system is inherently resilient—more capable of self-correction and
self-revitalization than its industrial rival. Unfortunately, in the real
world of farming, ideas like "resilience" must compete with realities like
"costs" and "profits," and producers and consumers alike gravitate toward
simpler standards—even if those standards don't represent truly sustainable
practices. Worries Kirschenmann, "We've come to see sustainability as some
kind of fixed prescription—if you just do these 10 things, you will be
sustainable, and you won't need to worry about it anymore."

This tendency to replace complexity with checklists is the hallmark of the
alternative food sector. Today's federal requirements for organic food, for
example, only hint at the richness of the original concept, which encouraged
farmers to not only forgo chemical fertilizers but also replenish soils
on-site, using livestock manure or crop rotations. The problem is that
replenishing on-site is costly and time consuming. As demand for organic has
grown and farmers have been pushed to gain the same überefficiencies as their
industrial rivals, more of them (particularly those selling to chain
groceries) simply import manure from feedlots, sometimes hundreds of miles
away. Technically, these farms are still organic—they don't use chemical
fertilizers. But is something really sustainable if the natural fertilizer
must travel such distances or come from feedlots, the apotheosis of unsafe,
unsustainable production? Forget about food miles. What about poop miles?






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