Almost two years after its founding in a basement in Berkeley, California, The Greenhorns has
matured from an idea for a recruitment film into a widespread national
community. We are now happily rooted on my first commercial farm,
Smithereen, on rented land in the Hudson Valley of New York.
Sadly, the green I'm referring to is the color of money. As Tom Philpott reports,
Big Ag is trying to get an agricultural technique known as "chemical
no-till" established as a legitimate carbon offset in the Waxman/Markey
legislation. There's only one problem, all the research out there says
that chemical no-till doesn't actually sequester carbon:
The Food and Drug Administration found recently that samples of a feed
by-product from dozens of corn-ethanol plants were contaminated with
antibiotics. With that news, producing vehicle fuel from grain is
looking not only like a wasteful and inefficient process, but also
like a danger to human health.
Growing corn is a leading cause of soil erosion as well as water
depletion and pollution. Corn ethanol plants further stress our water
supplies by consuming four gallons of water for every gallon of fuel
produced.
ALFRED - Just three days into her summer apprenticeship at Wolf Pine Farm, Elizabeth Hartsig, 27, appeared to be adjusting quickly to her first experience as an organic farmhand, despite a sunburn.
Hartsig, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs and has a master's degree in creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis, eagerly demonstrated what to do about the cutworms that have been showing up in the Swiss chard.
"You pick them up and rip them in half," she said.
As important as Michelle Obama's arms are to
news reporters, the children helping plant and maintain the White
House vegetable garden have an even more compelling story. They may
be planting democracy along with carrots and lettuce.
At the Northeast Farm-to-School conference last week, children,
teachers, farmers and school food administrators described every
kind of project imaginable linking children directly with food
production.
It was April 18 -- a warm and sunny day, weather completely unlike we had seen for some time.
I
must confess, I didn't have a chance to buy those not-so-fancy farming
overalls like I had hoped. But, I did manage to plant my grains -- inch
by inch, (or thereabouts) crooked row by crooked row.
Red Fife, a
hard wheat variety, emmer and hulless oats made up my crop -- and by
crop I mean whatever I could jam into my 200-square foot plot, which,
incidentally, feels a whole lot bigger when you have to pull the weeds
out.
As the world staggers from one economic crisis to another, it seems
easy to forget the global food crisis that occupied centre stage in
2008.
World prices for essential grains more than doubled between 2006 and 2008.
Rice,
the staple food of most of Asia, doubled in price in just seven months.
And, despite their commitments to trade liberalisation, a few
significant grain-exporting developing countries rushed to protect
domestic grain stocks by banning exports.
I've been pondering a lot the last three weeks, trying to think
outside the box, and trying to proceed as if there is no box at
all. Two weeks of conferences in a row, one the Kellogg Foundation Food
and Society Conference, the second sponsored by the University of
California Agriculture and Natural Resources. Very different
conferences, but a common theme: Food Systems All the Time.
Farmers claim to be stewards of the environment, some would say it's best friend; others, its worst enemy. The truth is we can be both.
Humans have never left a small footprint, we have always tried to shape the environment to suit our needs. Initially farming had one purpose, food; farming provided a more stable diet than the hunter-gatherer existence.
