Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Strategizing on the Transition to Organic Agriculture

While I was off enjoying a couple of days of wine, husband and song, Richard Heinberg was publishing yet another essential paper on our food system http://www.energybulletin.net/38091.html. I recommend it to you all, mostly as useful clarification of the overarching goals of an agricultural transition. I was particularly struck by this quotation, which seems to me to be usefully striking and darkly clarifying,

Zafar Adeel, director of the International Network on Water, Environment and Health (INWEH), has calculated that more food will have to be produced during the next 50 years than during the last 10,000 years combined.

That is, not only must be deal with the problems we have created, but we must continue to raise food production levels.

Transforming our food system, of course, is the subject nearest and dearest to my heart. I write about other things all the time, of course, but how we will eat in the future strikes me as the most urgent question we face. Heinberg's excellent essay offers, I think a very clear primer to what the problems are and what to do.

I do, however, think that one paragraph is a little misleading. Talks, by their very nature, leave as much out as they can put in, but I do think that something important is missing from this paragraph:

Several agronomists at Cuban universities had for many years been advocating a transition to organic methods. Cuban authorities responded to the crisis by giving these ecological agronomists carte blanche to redesign the nation's food system. Officials broke up large state-owned farms, offered land to farming families, and encouraged the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.

As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine.

From my own reading, and from what I've learned from Pat Murphy and Faith Morgan who were in Cuba for the filming of "The Power of Community" there's a step here missing. Before the agronomists were given carte blanche (or perhaps before their influence was felt - I honestly don't know), before the government broke up large farms, people started growing gardens. That is, the government's intervention may have enabled more people to grow urban gardens and put rabbits on their roofs, but the idea and the need to eat came from ordinary Cubans. That is, this was not a top-down national strategy at first, but one enabled by government, rather than conceived by it. I think this bears some emphasis.

Does this distinction really matter so much? I think it does, because of where it locates the power to achieve something as basic as food security. I also think it matters, because of a principle I've been developing to analyze what and how solutions might actually work. The principle is this (you can call it "Astyk's law" - I've always wanted a law ;-) ) "Top down strategies must be concurrent with and redundant to bottom up strategies" What does this mean? Well, I don't happen to trust my government to act in my interests. So while I support top down strategies, I believe that the top down strategies we advocate should be built upon bottom up strategies, created by the people.

What does that mean in practice? Well, let us imagine that America experienced an (unlikely) sudden shortage of fossil fuels on the order of Cuba's. Let us further imagine that our government actually decided to do something about it. Anyone want to take bets one what we would do?

They might break up corporate farms and hand them out to small scale organic farmers. Maybe. This would represent an enormous break with the past, however. It is possible that a crisis and a better government than our present one could precipitate such a move. But it is also possible that we would follow out a pattern that Naomi Klein has exhaustively documented in _The Shock Doctrine_ of privatizing any resource that is worth anything. And in a food-straitened world, what could be worth more than arable land?

Just as the disaster in New Orleans led to a new, privatized school system, just as towns with too many poor people are now beginning to seceed and hire private corporations for security and governing purposes, imagine the value of a hideously mutated CSA system, in which affluent families sign up with "Cowaburton" to receive weekly deliveries of grain, produce and meat from their personally reserved 25 acres that can never be used to grow food for anyone else.

Don't mistake me here - I agree with Heinberg's stated goals. But I think that the idea that the leaders of the organic food movement will be able to make food policy anytime soon is probably mistaken. And while we must try to make these kinds of policies - we must also make our activism redundant to, and coherent with our personal actions. That is, we must fully integrate our activism with our practices.

That means we need to assume that our activism will not work - while not slacking off, we need to accept that Cuba didn't give power to the agronomists before the famine, they did it afterwards. And other historical models suggest that this will be the case - in the Soviet Union, as far as I am aware, virtually no government measures supported the population, who fed themselves in large parts from their gardens. During the collapse of the SU, no one could figure out why it was that the Russian people were not starving to death - it turned out was small gardens and farms springing up everywhere. In the US, the Victory Garden movement began in private garden clubs and remained there during World War I and well into the second world war. It was only after Eleanor Roosevelt put a Victory garden on the White House lawn that the government took over advocacy for Victory gardening. The simple truth is that the history of the food movement suggests that government support comes only after the crisis, and after public solutions have already been adopted. While I agree with Heinberg that it is important that we have a plan and strategy to offer government when they finally move on this, and that there be organized activism to prevent corporations from stepping in with the CSA- from-hell model or something worse, that plan cannot be our highest priority - priority number one is preventing famine to begin with. While it would be easier to do this on the policy level, we must create redundant systems on the assumption that our attempts to make change will fail.

In _For Hunger Proof Cities_, Michael W. Hamm and Monique Baron have an essay asking whether the state of New Jersey could become food secure. Their answer is that it would require the existing agricultural land of New Jersey, along with either 115,000 additional acres of agricultural land, or 6.8 million gardens of 100 square feet or 3.4 million gardens of 200 square feet, or a balance between them. 100 or 200 square feet is a very small garden. In addition, were existing farms to be used more efficiently, using intensive organic agriculture, even more people could be fed - that is, there is excellent reason to believe that New Jersey could produce enough food to feed itself and a not-insignificant percentage of neighboring New York City - mostly by gardening.

So a national move to Victory gardening has the potential to act not only as a preventative to famine, but also as a model for the government to take up. That is, governments generally like universally applicable theories of how the world should work - if a Friedmanesque privatized model can be shown (manipulated) to work in limited situations, and no other useful model exists, the former will probably be adopted. Unless we have victory gardens feeding people and providing advocacy and training in large numbers, the odds are good that we may not get what we need when times get lean.

The other issue we must take up immediately, is the issue of training and transmission of land. At this point, the majority of all agricultural land is still in the hands of farm families. But the average US farmer is almost sixty years old, and the children of most farmers don't want to take up their parents' career. Over the next decade or so, we will probably engage in the largest land transfer in history in the US, as an older generation of farmers retires. If they cannot give their land to family members, or cannot find young people (or groups of young people) who want to farm the land, can farm the land and can offer them not just some money, but the idea that they will maintain a tradition, they will sell the land to the highest bidder. Any guesses on who *that* will be? We must develop strategies, and probably economic support mechanisms to make sure that land stays with the people.

That is, it is not merely enough to advocate for the deindustrialization of agriculture, we must put our hands in and take an active role in doing so. The two most immediate ways this will play out is in our buying, and also whether we ourselves are training to take over land and become farmers (and not just for our own subsistence in many cases) and whether we are training our children to do so.

The first matter is self-evident - corporate power depends on money - our money. If we cut the power lines, we can give ourselves a shot at being able to compete politically with corporations. If we keep shopping at the supermarket, we won't be able to do so - industrial agriculture will crush us. And if the millions of American acres that are currently in corporate hands, and the millions of American acres that could enter them over the next decades do, the odds are good that the poor will starve - and you and I may well be among the poor.

That second point is as urgent as the first two - we have to garden, we have to stop buying industrial food. But we also must enable the coming land transition to move into the hands of people who have the interest of the nation at heart - that is, the nation's people.

That means many of us, including people who were never trained to farm, must take on the role of learning how and farming land, and build relationships with aging farmers. And not just farmers - with people who have land - period. It is as essential that we grow food in cities and suburbs as it is we do it on farmland. Wealth, in the form of land and housing, is disproportionately concentrated in the hands of older people - who have compelling needs as well, mostly health and security related. We must build links between older people who have land and homes and younger ones who can provide care, security and energy. Otherwise, again, the biological wealth of good land will transfer hands, not to those who will steward it, but to those who will concentrate it in their own hands.

The answers to the public-private debate always come down to "both together" - that is, all of this will be better done with government support. Some things can only be done at the state or national level. BUT - and this is the big BUT, there is no essential place in our adaptation strategies where we can afford to leave anything to purely government level strategies - we must alway, always have full concurrence and redundancy - that is, whenever we face essential issues like food, health care, security, transportation, jobs, economy we must balance our advocacy with a plan and a model and a set of practices that we are implementing right now.

Sharon

26 comments:

Wendy said...

It's too bad there aren't more places like this. They live on land trust land owned by the city of Scarborough. In addition to the CSA, they provide a number of community outreach programs including summer 'farm camp.'

Just down the road from them, on more land trust land, is a community garden for residents of the city of Portland, Maine.

It's some very cool stuff going on. I hope more states and communities adopt this model.

Anonymous said...

Do you have an idea for your next book yet? I bet you could do a great novel based on your imagining of a "Cowaburton" future, a la The Handmaid's Tale.

Anonymous said...

Some of what is needed though is for people to be aware of the need to break the habit of shopping for convenience at the grocery store. I was thinking about this when a neighbor I'm friendly with(who lives about 4 miles away down my road) brought me 2 bags of egg cartons she had saved. Now she has never to my knowledge ever bought a single carton of eggs from me. Rather, she has bought high-priced "organic" large producer eggs from the grocery store as it is too inconvenient to bother to shop at her neighbors-for eggs, produce and whatever, when she can just go to the grocery store. How do we deal with this mind-set? If we want small producers to do more than just grow for their families, but also for others, to have to beg your neighbors to shop local? Now if I were willing to deliver the eggs to her, or the berries, etc that would probably be ok with her- but this gets insane and she is not going to pay for delivery!

I just see this as one of the issues- there are some people willing to join CSA's(but most people out here will not come here to pick up their orders but want it delivered), and some will shop farmers' markets, but most crave convenience which favors large producers, corporate ag and grocery stores......

Tom said...

I travel around the Pacific Northwest covering ag and energy issues for a local community radio station. In my travels I've come across many young people who are enthusiastically working at alternative agriculture. Some, but not many, are the children fo back-to-the-land hippies from the seventies. For me it's deja vu all over again as I was once one of those hippies.

For this generation the stakes are much higher and there may well be no mainstream society to return to as so many of my generation did. My guess is they'll stick it out this time. But they need access to land and a stake in the outcome.

Cowaburton CSAs? Ummm I don't think so in this area. More likely is the privatized CSA of 25 or so families. That idea is already floating around here. A Story: At a tenure celebration for a collegue of my wife's, I met a Russian woman who'd been an academic and was now married to a professor here. She said that during the dismantling of the Soviet state even basic foods werent available in stores. "Not even milk for the babies," she said.

People got by because they knew someone with a large garden at a dacha in the nearby countryside. We talked about agriculture problems associated with peak oil and eventually it came round to how many people it would take to have enough money to buy a farm. "When you get it worked out, count me in," she said.

There is a growing number of CSAs in the northwest, most close to cities. They are frequently on land leased by Asian immigrants who really know how to farm. They sell at farmer's markets too; usually at grocery-store prices or above. Prices are rising and have priced out non-affluent buyers.

There is also Puget Consumer's Coop's farmland fund. PCC is lending money to farmers, and sometimes buying outright, farmland in danger of being paved. So they are ensuring their access to food to sell in their stores. IN a way it's a CSA being funded by a co-op. But PCC isn't cheap. Poor people don't shop there much.

From the consumer's perspective, it seems to me, there is little security in the CSA or farmer's market model. Here, on the pacific coast we can garden year round, and I do. But I don't have enough land to provide everything we need.

I keep thinking about the Russian woman and the collectively owned farm. But who would do the actual work? A bunch of overworked 50ish academics? Not likely. But we could provide access to land to younger people in exchange for food.

RAS said...

What's needed is a way to help younger people who would like to farm get access to land. There are more young people in their 20s and 30s than one would think who would like to farm but can't afford land. (I'm one of them.) So what kind of arrangements could be made? Maybe an organization could be formed that would connect older farmers who are retiring and want their land kept in farming with young people who want to do the work?

Anonymous said...

Excellent post. A few ideas for spreading the meme:

I have often thought that Habitat for Humanity may be an avenue to spread the Victory Garden idea. If you are going to help deserving people get into a house, why not also set them up with a garden, fruit/nut trees/shrubs, chicken coop? Evidence of interest in growing food could be a criteria for selection of Habitat for Humanity recipients. Perhaps recipients would be required to take training and pass a test, to ensure they will maintain the garden properly.

Edible Landscaping companies. I'll bet that the higher food prices get, the more people will recognize the value of backyard food. The rich and lazy might hire someone to build edible landscapes. Selling point:: "the installation cost pays for itself over 5 years of free produce". Low maintenance trees/shrubs, perennial veges and self-seeding annuals would be ideal for this service. Whatever gets food growing in people's back yards is good for all, spreads the idea.

Landlords may be interested in edible landscapes. Selling point: free food from the backyard will leave more $ for paying rent. Well-nourished tenants will outperform in life/work and make them more likely to keep their jobs. Increases the value of the rental property. Banksters may like the same logic regarding their debt slaves.

I didn't like writing the selling points in the last 2 paragraphs, but you have to appeal to peoples self-interest in this world. A backup supply of food will make your community more stable. It will help of business leaders see benefit for their businesses.

Produce and meat are the most profitable parts of grocery stores from what I have been able to read. Expect some resistance from that quarter.

sgage said...

"The principle is this (you can call it "Astyk's law" - I've always wanted a law ) "Top down strategies must be concurrent with and redundant to bottom up strategies"

You have just succinctly put into words what I've felt for years (decades, actually), but couldn't quite crystallize. Thank you very much! I will surely refer to it as Astyk's Law.

And surely this concept is our main hope in this bleak and bizzarro time...

Alan said...

The Oregon Food Bank here in Portland offers classes in vegetable gardening. Here's a link:
http://tinyurl.com/2rehl4

Growing Gardens also teaches low-income Portlanders how to grow food and helps them get their gardens started. Here's their site: http://www.growing-gardens.org/

There's also a small woman-owned business whose name I can't lay my hands on right now which will come to your house and set up an organic raised bed garden of any size in your yard, plant it with vegetables of your choice and teach you how to care for it and harvest it.

This approach gets around people's reluctance to expend a lot of energy and time on something they have no knowledge of or confidence in their ability to do properly. It gets them started and can demonstrate to them how great home-grown food is and how easy it can be to raise it.

And, Ani, please consider that it is probably more energy efficient for a CSA to deliver its orders using one vehicle from a central location than it is for each member to gas up the minivan and drive out in the country to pick up their produce.

Convenience sometimes is another word for efficiency. Imagine if every household had to drive (or bike, or walk) out to the UPS warehouse by the airport to pick up a parcel instead of a truck routed by the most efficient route delivering those same parcels to addresses across the city.

Most people would say that driving out to pick up a parcel at the warehouse would be a horrible inconvenience, but it would also waste horrendous amounts of fuel while producing a tremendous amount of unnecessary air pollution.

Maybe your CSA doesn't have the time or resources to deliver your produce to your members, but maybe a member on a tight budget could make the deliveries in exchange for his or her share?

It may not be efficient for your neighbor to drive 4 miles to buy your eggs, but if your delivery driver could drop her eggs off on his way to his other deliveries, maybe she could become interested.

Many if not most Americans are wedded to convenience. If we are to make headway we must show that our ways are not radically inconvenient, totally impractical, ridiculously expensive alternatives to the supermarket model.

Anonymous said...

Sharon, in your law the wording should be changed to "concurrent and redundant with," not "concurrent with and redundant to."

"Redundant" (like "concurrent")takes "with," not "to." For example, one would write, "The first sentence in John's essay was redundant with the second sentence."

Anonymous said...

As a p.s., I might add that it would be better to further revise the phrase to "both concurrent and redundant with"; this more firmly links "concurrent" to the preposition and thus is even clearer.

Bottom line: "redundant to" is wrong, as becomes clear when you think about it for a moment.

Anonymous said...

ras, depending where you are and who you are, there are programs like you're talking about. Land Stewardship Program here runs a program called Farm Beginnings that teaches organic and sustainable farming techniques, business practices, and helps people find land and funding.

And there are programs through (I think all) the land-grant colleges to offer transitional training and the use of land to immigrants with farming backgrounds. I'd guess almost half of the food at our farmer's market comes from Hmong and Somali farmers who started out farming very small plots owned by the city, the transit authority, or the University. Some of them have been here 20 or 30 years and now own truck farms of their own.

jewishfarmer said...

Heineken, thanks for the grammar correction - you are right, of course. When I rewrite this, I'll include the correction.

Rebecca, one thing that I've found is that it is almost always easier to rent land in populated areas than to buy it - to rent a vacant lot or open space for farming is far cheaper and is how many younger farmers get started. But honestly, I think building some kind of matching program between older farmers, homesteaders and gardeners and younger people will be essential - because so much of what you learn about agriculture is specific to a particular place, piece of land and set of pratices.

Ani, I agree with you about convenience - and, of course, one of the big issues there is time. Industrial society sucks up our time more than at any other point in history - and that's a message I think that has to go out, because most of us want time as much as money.

Sharon

Anonymous said...

I have very little hope that the US populace will rise en masse (bottom up strategies) to the middle to meet the government. And, I have very little hope that the corporate-controlled US government will come down (top down strategies) to the middle to help the common people avoid famine. The raison d'etre of our corporate-controlled US government is to benefit the elites. In a crisis, their raison d'etre will intensify, not change direction suddenly to benefit the US masses. I think we are more likely to see corporations controlling (via our government) CSAs than to see our government redistributing agribusiness lands to the people.

An example of elite's thinking and planning regarding food is the Doomsday Seed Vault in Norway. As it turns out, it is controlled by exactly those multinational forces who would bring about future disaster so that they can control water, seeds, and food. The following article is very informative, especially on the background of the so-called Green Revolution of the sixties-seventies.

See:

"Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic: Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don't."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.
php?context=va&aid=7529

~Vegan/Leaving So. FL

Anonymous said...

I certainly can't speak for the whole U.S., but folks in Massachusetts are certainly working hard on growing more of their own food. We have programs for helping get the word out about local produce, an increasing number of CSAs, and even the state gov't is helping out some (altho' we aren't counting on it solely!).

Our dairy farmers are still seeing challenges because of the big dairy states, and we do still have the age gap with which to contend. But we (and some other states) are trying to put old and new farmers together, through the New England Small Farm Institute. Also, Pioneer Farm Credit Union has some programs for working with new as well as established farmers. Also, the state has some grant programs that help agricultural businesses and provide some protection from developers.

On the individual level, I did manage to encourage some folks to garden, who hadn't done it before, or were getting discouraged. Some had more success than others (one group of three lives too close to Monsanto, we think), but even they managed to get some crops in. Another family I know has worked with the management at their apartment complex, getting them to expand the community garden -- less to mow, and the poorer people are more likely to be able to pay their rent. They also drop off their extra food at the rental office, so the mgt. folks can distribute it to the more needy renters. And I'm happy to say that we managed to sell our house, with its apple trees and strawberry beds to a couple who want to continue food gardening there.

Not what I'd call a grassroots movement I suppose, but not insignificant either, is it?

And this coming summer, when we increase the garden beds here at the farm, I'm hoping to get some friends in on working on it, so that we can produce more than last year, and we can learn more about food preservation techniques. We aren't rich, but we have probably the best cash flow in our circle, so I'm hoping to use it to get some more folks up to speed on useful skills, and we'll all have more food in the pantry. might only be a half dozen people, but then they can teach others... that's the plan, anyway!

Anonymous said...

More power in every way to the people!
Gardening and other local food strategies make a lot of sense. In addition city dwellers will need new alliances with rural farmers for their animal products other wise the new "victory gardens" with be insufficient for most people.

The future of food security is in the direct relationships between city of rural people. The message needs to be developed through all forms of communication and delivered in as many of the city's venues as possible. Through documentaries and the like the city folks can begin to meet their country neighbors and see where food comes from, etc.
One such documentary is in production now in California: In Search of Good Food". The theme is local sustainable food systems in California. Every state can benefit by having their own documentaries so that the public knows the status of local food security and can begin to get a picture of what is needed to close the gap.

Cheers!
Chef Jem
Assistant to the producer of:
http://insearchofgoodfood.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

In regard to "That is, not only must be deal with the problems we have created, but we must continue to raise food production levels" is a view I shared but no longer.

Daniel Quinn "Story of B" (excerpt here: http://www.schuerkamp.de/zope/hoover/quinn/art01)

Or failing to increase food by 2%, "each of us is going to be short about forty calories a day—three ounces of orange juice.
Now, this is what I want to know. Does this sound like mass starvation to anyone here? Are there people here who feel they’d be starving if they missed a couple of swallows of orange juice a day?" found here: www.friendsofishmael.org/tools/readers/files/ReachingForTheFuture_Pamphlet.doc

Meanwhile the biomass of the earth is being converted to human biomass and biodiversity to mankind on his grain crops.

Anonymous said...

Do you think there'll be scarcity of food for health in the future?

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