Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

I think this guy need to get out more.  He needs to see how people have done 
it for centuries and see what's happening already.


A Balance Between the Factory and the Local Farm
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/business/14every.html
By DAMON DARLIN Published: February 13, 2010

INDUSTRIAL food production is not very fashionable right now.

Three books by Michael Pollan criticizing the system of giant corporate farms 
and food factories have topped the best-seller lists. A graphic documentary, 
“Food, Inc.,” based in part on his books, has been nominated for an Academy 
Award.

In Washington, Michelle Obama grew vegetables on the White House lawn as an 
example of self-sufficiency. And across America, more farmers’ markets and 
restaurants have popped up that sell vegetables and meat produced on small 
farms.

Diners now scan the menus at their local restaurants for provenances like 
“Cattail Creek Ranch lamb” or “Hudson Valley rabbit.” And home cooks now 
await boxes of fresh produce delivered weekly from local growers.

Some of these so-called locavores may think they are part of a national 
movement that will replace corporate food factories with small family farms. 
But as much of the East Coast lies blanketed beneath a foot or more of snow, 
it’s as good a time as any to raise a few questions about the trend’s 
viability.

First, how practical is local food sourcing in a nation that enjoys a 
diversity of food? From a practical standpoint, there isn’t much that can be 
grown in winter in most parts of the country.

“You can dig parsnips out of the ground,” said the chef Payton Curry, 
referring to his native state of Minnesota. “It’s 10 below there.” Mr. Curry 
features locally sourced food at his Caffe Boa restaurants in Tempe and Mesa, 
Ariz.

The problem isn’t confined to the snow belt. Recently, I asked a neighbor who 
was bringing in her weekly box of locally grown produce what she got this 
time. “Kale,” she said. “A lot of kale.” And this is in Northern California.

Then there are the inconsistencies in locavore behavior. People who eagerly 
order microgreens — tenderly cut with scissors by a farmer that morning — 
would be scandalized if a Chilean grape was served next to them.

But their wine and water? Those tend to be shipped in from far-flung places. 
Rarely, for example, do you hear a New York restaurant bragging of its Long 
Island wine. Even at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, Calif., restaurant where 
Alice Waters got the whole local-ingredients trend started, two out of three 
wines on a recent evening — the wine list changes daily — did not come from 
the acclaimed wine regions that begin only 25 miles away.

A friend of Mr. Curry’s, Pavle Milic, has gone to the extreme of serving only 
Arizona-made wines at FnB, his small restaurant in Scottsdale, Ariz. The 
concept may surprise some customers, but he says that some of the same people 
who sneer at a Pillsbury Casa Blanca Pinot Gris from Cochise County will 
declare in blind taste tests that they thought it came from a famous 
wine-growing region.

“I develop a thick skin here with what I do,” he said. And he acknowledges 
that “I risk losing a guest who doesn’t want to drink an Arizona wine.”

Granted, wine doesn’t have to be fresh to be good. And freshness is the 
compelling reason driving the locavore movement. Unlike organic food, which 
can taste no different from food grown with chemicals, fresh food does taste 
better.

But what started as an effort to source fresher ingredients from nearby 
family farms is now as much about reducing the carbon footprint and the “food 
miles” of food. Ordering water from the South Pacific island of Fiji or wine 
from New Zealand when the local stuff is quaffable seems to run counter to 
those ideals.

PEOPLE who grow vegetables in empty lots and schoolyards have a nice, 
wholesome hobby — but one that can make little sense economically. A few 
years ago, William Alexander wrote a delightful book chronicling his 
gardening travails, “The $64 Tomato.” He revealed a truth about 
do-it-yourself gardening: It is more efficient to buy a fresh tomato in the 
farmer’s market for $1.50 a pound.

(In San Francisco, where I live, that means going to a market patronized 
largely by immigrants, not the foodie-dominated ones with inflated prices 
that put fresh food out of the reach of the poor. )

As a sustainable trend, localism bears at least some resemblance to Mao 
Tse-tung’s Great Leap Forward. In the late 1950s, Mao decreed that steel 
production be localized in backyard steel furnaces. Villagers began melting 
down pots and pans and creating their own steel, which amounted to 
low-quality and largely useless pig iron.

It was a bad idea that dragged down the nation’s productivity and played a 
role in widespread famine.

Localism is difficult to scale up enough to feed a whole country in any 
season. But on the other extreme are the mammoth food factories in the United 
States. Here, frequent E. coli and salmonella bacteria outbreaks are the food 
industry’s version of Toyota’s sudden-acceleration and braking problems. It 
may be a case of a manufacturing system that has grown too fast or too large 
to be managed well.

Somewhere, there is a happy medium.