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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008
  • Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:12:46 -0700


As promised:

So... Farmer "Fleming" (if he's real) can't figure out how to deal with
weeds without Roundup. Too bad, they farmed without Roundup for millenia.
Farmers used to cultivate shallowly between rows to get weeds. More recently
researchers have proved the effectiveness of cover crops to cut down on
weeds, and mowed to make a winter mulch in place. "Fleming" can't understand
that tillage brings weed seeds to the surface, or that chemical farming has
made farmland more prone to grow certain weeds instead of healthy crops. He
should spend his time farming a much smaller area and do it properly, since
he's probably not making any money with industrial scale farming anyway.

>Where the consensus fails is over what should replace the bad
>old industrial system.

That's if we don't want to know what to replace it with. Like millions of
small farms and home & market growers who can grow sustainably. Duh.

>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.

No evidence to back him up at all. Studies have shown the enormous
footprint of processed foods with most ingredients from hundreds or thousands
of miles away. And most small market growers live fairly close to markets
anyway. But food miles is more than distance. Produce from California's
Central Valley may take a week to land on your grocery shelf, losing fresh
taste and nutrition all the way.

>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.

If true, that's still not counting the embodied energy in the manufacture
of trucks, or the fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides used to grow
almost all long distance produce.

>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.

Not so much if you still eat chemically grown, trucked in produce from far
away.

>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.

The real reality is farmers don't make money anyway, the middlemen do.
Real sustainable farming sustains the farmer first of all. All he can see is
"producers and consumers", as if millions of families could never grow much
of their own food. And need I point out that if farmers markets weren't
profitable they wouldn't exist.

>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?

Who said anything about trucking in contaminated feedlot manure? There's
enough free organic waste - fertilizer of all kinds - around this country to
last for ages. Esp if it's collected and used locally by home and market
growers. Costly and time consuming, if you don't know how to farm, and he
doesn't.

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

But he never tells us what will. Hmmmm.


paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 12/29/2009 at 4:09 PM Tradingpost wrote:

>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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>Livingontheland mailing list
>Livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
>http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/livingontheland







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