Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Exactly. This is why making growing profitable is such an uphill struggle. 
And why it's a topic almost taboo among growers. But if sustainable growing 
can't first sustain the growers there won't be enough growers no matter how 
much people want real food. Bottom line.

I can't go with the argument that policy should subsidize our work, not at 
all. Policy should stop subsidizing industrial agriculture which makes junk 
food cheaper than real food. That's not all. Fortunes have been spent 
promoting junk food - not real food, not natural, unprocessed, unpackaged, 
unadulterated food. It's a miracle there's an organic or fresh local movement 
at all considering it's against all odds.

But things change. Here's the last person I'd expect to see promoting home 
cooking - just tonite Barb showed me what Guy Fiero (punked out show host) 
was doing on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, who's on a reality show tour to 
cities showing ordinary people *how to cook*. He told his audience about 30 
years ago people stopped cooking at home and need to do it again and involve 
the kids. His audience went wild.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net


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

On 8/14/2010 at 12:08 PM EJ wrote:

Some people would argue that policy is more important than individual 
consumers:

It's the policy, stupid
Why eaters alone can’t transform the food system

by Tom Philpott

In the cover piece of the newest American Prospect, Heather Rogers skillfully 
makes a point I've been flogging for years: that public policy, not consumer 
choice, is the villain propping up the industrial food system and 
constraining the growth of organic farming.

Rogers, author of the new book Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is 
Undermining the Environmental Revolution, opens with the example of a New 
York State farmer named Morse Pitts. He sells the bounty of his 15-acre 
Windfall Farm in the Hudson Valley at Manhattan's famed Union Square market, 
where his eggs command a steep $14 per dozen and "some of his greens go for 
more than $40 per pound." Yet even though his weekly market stand teems with 
consumers eager to "vote with their forks" (to speak nothing of their 
checking accounts), he nets just $7 per hour for his labor and plans to shut 
down his operation soon.

The problem, Rogers makes clear, is a widespread lack of infrastructure for 
supporting small-scale, ecologically minded farmers. The public resources 
that might do just that are siphoned off by the industrial food system, in 
the form of commodity subsidies and largesse to the corn ethanol industry. 
Farmers like Pitts have to pass on the costs of their ecological stewardship 
directly to their customers in the form of eye-popping prices, which still 
don't add up to a decent salary, while industrial-scale farms can generally 
trash the environment with impunity, letting society as a whole, or distant 
communities, pick up the bill. See, for example, the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone.

More: 
http://www.grist.org/article/food-why-eaters-alone-cant-transform-the-food-system/

Dieter Brand wrote:
> We live in a consumer society.  This means that the consumer decides the 
> future shape of farming by the choices she makes in the shop.  Neither the 
> government nor the corporations have the power to change the status quo.  
> They do have the power to influence public opinion, but in the end, they 
> are just as powerless to change things as we are.
>
>