Adirondack Erratic

How do our food choices affect climate change, land use, local economies, world trade? A movement is emerging to connect people more directly with the foods they buy, an ethic that looks at the hidden costs of our current food system. (A similar discussion about the hidden costs of our material culture has yet to reach mass consciousness , but that’s another topic.) Two recent articles add to the accumulating wisdom that says buy whole foods, buy local, go organic, and cut down on meat.

Last fall, Cornell researchers compared the amount of land needed to maintain various diets based on New York agriculture.

“A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food,” said Christian Peters, M.S. ‘02, Ph.D. ‘07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. “A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres.”

Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use.

According to the findings, supplementing a mostly plant based diet with small amounts of meat uses less prime agricultural land, because animals can be pastured on more marginal acreage. For more info, read here.

The second article comes from the North Country Kitchen column in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise by Yvona Fast who maintains a website at wordsaremyworld.com. This article, written for Earth Day sums up a commonsense approach to eating “green.” As she says,

By reducing waste, recycling, using fewer resources, and buying locally raised, pastured meat and organically grown vegetables at farmer’s markets, you can honor the earth’s bounty and sustain natural resources. Waste less food, produce less greenhouse gas, and consider how your food choices affect the rest of the world.

You can read the rest of her article here.

Beautiful weather means everyone is on the move - including this woodpecker beating my alarm clock lately (the hose sprayer does seem to cool him off.) And it means an influx of hungry deer.

It took a surprisingly short time to get the electric fence going again this summer. In order to condition the deer to the fence I’ve put bait on bits of foil all around the perimeter. The idea is for the deer to touch a tender part (their noses) to the fence, getting an instructive shock. We will see; last year they blithely walked through the fence to reach the goodies in the garden.

My charger setup is on the left; the picture on the right shows the baited foil, with garlic sprouting in the background.

And here’s a shot of the forsythia, just because it’s so lovely.

Sunday was one of the best days skiing at Whiteface - soft snow, crazy spirits, beautiful views. I returned home to see bare ground peeking out from the snow edges, enticing me to pull my first weeds. The growing season begins!

Last week I stoked my enthusiasm for expanding my gardens by attending a workshop on high tunnel growing in Saranac Lake, sponsored by the Cornell Cooperative Extension.
Various presenters, including farmers and researchers, talked about the pros and cons of growing under plastic (mostly the pros) and showed a number of different types of structures that could be used. Investment costs range from over $10,000 to grow raspberries to a few hundred dollars for low tunnels, such as the ones built by Eliot Coleman as a demonstration for the Common Ground Fair in Maine.

(to be continued…)

The sky is blue, the conifers are green, and the garden is buried beneath feet of snow. It’s almost April first! Click here to see a small view of the early, early spring signs, or just go the the “Photos” page above.

Having taken the time to read through Oxfam’s guide to the 2007 Farm Bill, I appreciate why it is so difficult to talk about. Although the majority of funds included in this omnibus bill go for food stamps and other nutrition programs, the commodity and trade support portions of the bill concentrate payments into the hands of a select group of “farmers”, some of whom collect payouts through pass-through entities without ever getting their hands dirty. In addition, heavy handed trade policies flood the world market with US taxpayer subsidized commodities, like cotton, putting farmers in developing countries at risk.

Many groups have put together recommendations for farm bill reform. American Farmland Trust has a web-based email form for painlessly sending a message to our elected reps; Oxfam’s “Fairness in the Fields” gives a succinct list of important steps that Congress could take to improve the bill. If we continue to raise our voices it might not be too late to have an impact on agricultural policy for the next five years!

A couple of years ago I stumbled onto this organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, which aims to promote kitchen gardens around the world. Founder Roger Doiron wants us to join together to grow the “localest” food of all, and to encourage others to do the same. KGI organizes several events to highlight backyard gardening including a Grow-Off Show-Off contest and an annual Kitchen Garden Day and spearheads creative ways to introduce the wider public to the joys and benefits of small scale gardening . Currently, Roger is campaigning to encourage the next president to plant a garden on the White House Lawn.

The website and e-newsletter are well put together, but the recent addition of a KGI forum has added a new dimension to the conversation. I have a feeling this site may turn out to be one of my most visited garden sites.

The first 2008 newsletter from GardenShare has a provocative article about workers’ rights and large scale organic farming. GardenShare focuses on hunger, community and local food in St. Lawrence county.

Elizabeth Henderson from the Agricultural Justice Project writes, that although the growth of large-scale organic farms

…still carries with it the benefit of reducing pesticide use in agriculture, these new organic farms often perpetuate the injustices present in agriculture in general -inadequate income for small-scale farmers and exploitative working conditions for farmworkers.

The article goes on to refer to a number of workers’ rights lawsuits against organic producers on the West coast. As Henderson points out, the organic label covers growing practices, not labor conditions. Yet another reason to buy from your local farmer, rather than Del Monte!

The deadline for passing a bill that will determine farm policy for the next 10 years has been extended one month to April 18. I have been reading documents trying to teach myself about the farm bill for months now, and have little to show for the effort besides a list of websites. American Farmland Trust has a coherent set of recommendations, including more funds for conservation and reform of the commodity program. Ken Cook has scads of information about who gets the money at Farm Subsidy Database, but it is somewhat difficult to use to find overall patterns. Oxfam America has a great pdf overview of the farm bill, and I’m going to read it carefully as soon as I finish this post.
Bottom line: Most of the Farm Bill funds are intended to support the kind of industrial agriculture favored over the past few decades. Increasing numbers of people would like to see a change in the vision of what US agriculture should look like; however the subsidy funds are controlled mainly by farm state senators and representatives who have plenty of incentives to preserve the status quo.

I am just beginning to put together some gear for the garden and market this year. Trying not to spend too much, but also trying not foolishly disadvantage myself. These three items (bought used) are winging their way to my house via the magic of Ebay.

First up, a few planting trays with inserts for 72 plugs each. I could have purchased trays of 128 or even 512 plugs, but I don’t have room to transplant very many plants (thinking of lettuce starts) and weather for planting out might not come along predictably enough before the plants outgrow the smaller slots.

Also en route is an Earthway seeder, an inexpensive walk-behind planter. I’m hoping it will cut down on the need for thinning, especially with veggies that will be seeded many times during the season. I also plan to use it for small scale cover cropping, reasoning that I’ll get better germination if I plant more consistently.

Finally, I’ve picked up a price computing scale for selling at the market this year. I’d like to let customers pick out their produce for themselves, and it should cut down on my pre-market prep time. The scale I’m buying has an adding function built in: you can enter a price, weigh the item, press add, and then enter a second price for a different item. This should help me keep a running total of a customer’s purchases.

The NY times published an article yesterday by Minnesota farmer Jack Hedin who ran afoul of the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. After renting some land on local farms, he found that he was going to pay dearly for growing vegetables on “corn base” land:

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

At a time when consumers are looking for locally grown produce, US agriculture policy makes it difficult for growers to meet demand. The not-quite-finished 2007 Farm Billwill direct national farm policy for the next five years. I will be researching this complex bill and providing links over the next few weeks.