Kevin Kelly on Local Food Systems
Kevin Kelly posted the following recently to http://blog.longnow.org/2009/05/06/michael-pollan-deep-agriculture/ :
Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past.
Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming
can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century
American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories
cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth.
A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true
modern miracle. “American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative,
and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to
give them a new set of requirements.”The benefit of a reformed food system, besides better food, better
environment and less climate shock, is better health and the savings of
trillions of dollars. Four out of five chronic diseases are
diet-related. Three quarters of medical spending goes to preventable
chronic disease. Pollan says we cannot have a healthy population,
without a healthy diet. The news is that we are learning that we cannot
have a healthy diet without a healthy agriculture. And right now,
farming is sick.Pollan outlined what this recovery for American farmers and food
producers should be. First a post-modern food system should be
“resolarized.” Right now it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to
manufacture 1 calorie of food on average, and 55 calories to produce 1
calorie of beef. If any industry should be solar-based it should be
food, which was the “original solar economy.” Instead, right now “we
are eating oil.” Cheap oil and farm policies subsidize the 5 main crops
(and only those crops), upon which the rest of our cheap food system is
based. These main crops are planted as monocultures, which require
cheap pesticides and fertilizers and produce wastes that are all
problems in themselves. Pollan’s solution is not to dismantle the food
system but to redirect it. Because of the long-term planning and
learning that stewarding land requires, he believes subsidies of some
type are essential for agriculture. Agriculture, he stated, should not
be a freemarket. By picking the proper incentives we can re-localize,
re-solarize, and revive the healing power of balanced farms and
wholesome gardens.Governments should reward farmers for diversifying away from
monocultures. Pollan gave a few examples of where this has worked at
scale. They should be rewarded for growing cover crops with the benefit
of reducing erosion. Rewarded for returning animals to the mix.
Rewarded for the amount of carbon they sequester in soil. Rewarded for
halting urban sprawl by keeping farmland intact. In fact farmland
should find a similar status as wetlands; developers and communities
get “credit” for retaining farmland. Farmers should be rewarded for
localize food provision. If only 2% of government contracts for food
(as in school lunch programs, or government-run hospitals) required
that the food be produced within 100 miles, it would transform the food
system.How might such change happen? Only if consumers and citizens demand
it. One thing that might help is if web cams and images of the actual
feed lot, or slaughterhouse, were required to be available for food
that flowed through it. Imagine getting a carton of milk that showed
not a metaphorical alpine meadow, but the real cages of the real dirty
cows that produced that liter of milk. Or put a second calories count
on labels, this one showing how many calories of energy it takes to
deliver the item to you.The major problem with his vision? He says there are simply not
enough farmers. Only 1 million now feed the US and other people of the
world. Many more people, many more college educated people, many more
innovators and entrepreneurs, and many more backyard gardeners need to
produce this new food system. Start in educational programs, such as
one promoted by Alice Waters, where kids learn to grow food, cook, and
eat smarter. “Make lunch an academic subject.” Follow the lead of
Michelle Obama and make turning lawns into organic gardens fashionable,
respectable.Make farms and farmers cool again.
-Kevin Kelly
(reposted under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ )
So, the question is: how can we plausibly increase the amount of farmers? The answer seems to be to take farming to where most of the people are at: in the cities. Thoughts or comments are welcome!
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"So, the question is: how can
"So, the question is: how can we plausibly increase the amount of
farmers? The answer seems to be to take farming to where most of the
people are at: in the cities."
I very much agree. In bringing farming to cities, we face two major obstacles, neither of which are insurmountable.
The first is that, even with intensive models such as Square-Foot gardening, Grow Biointensive, or SPIN, farming still requires land. A person aiming only to feed his or her own family might find a backyard sufficient, but someone trying to grow enough to earn a living is going to need either a lot of land on which they can grow during the regular growing season, or a more modest space with a greenhouse in which they can grow all year.
For all romantic and idealized notions people may have about farming, most urbanites who have a steady paycheck coming in, especially from a white collar job that they've obtained through many years of college and career climbing, aren't likely to chuck it all for a risky entrepreneurial venture that's bound to mean less money (especially at first) and a life of hard, dirty, sometimes smelly, often uncomfortable, physical labor outdoors.
Of course, not all city dwellers have such cushy lives. Many are poor and/or unemployed. Many already perform physical labor with no hope of advancement. For these people, farming offers the promise of a better life. These people, however, don't have the capital necessary to start, and usually aren't financially savvy enough or well connected enough to get it. Even peasants farming in developing nations on plots of an acre or less have more land than most of America's urban poor can afford to buy.
In a nutshell, those who have the means to farm generally don't want to, and those who want to generally don't have the means. This is true all over, but the problem is exacerbated in the city because of higher real estate prices. Community gardens are not the answer. They're a good way for people to learn horitcultural skills and to put some extra nutrients in their diets or a few dollars in their pockets, but the average community garden plot doesn't come even close to what's necessary to feed one person, let alone provide an income for an entire family.
This is where I put in my plug for Local Matters and offer high praise for the work Michael Jones and his colleagues are doing. They are developing a system to connect landless farmers with landowners willing to let others use their land. I am the beneficiary of their first test of this idea. They connected me with a man who owns about five acres in Columbus, maybe three miles from my home. In exchange for donating some produce to local food pantries and agreeing to manage a community garden on the front acre, I've been given access to the back acre for my own use. I worked out a similar deal on my own with another township's community garden, and I've been leasing a vacant lot for $1.00 a year from the city of Columbus for the past few years. In aggregate, I now have around two acres on which to farm. This year, I'm offering a CSA for the first time. My gross sales to date this year (as of May 7th) already equal over 70% of my total sales for all of 2008 when I had only a half-acre--and the season is only starting!
I said there were two big problems. Getting land into the hands of the people who want to work it was the first. The second is the morass of municipal regulations criminalizing agriculture. I've written extensively about this elsewhere, so I won't belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that in neighborhoods where hanging out laundry is prohibited and everyone's Christmas lights have to match, the controlling authorities frown upon having livestock and hayfields next door. Until we can change urban sensibilities enough to eliminate or at least loosen up some of the agri-phobic codes and regulations presently in place, we can't grow food in the city on a wide scale without constant harassment from health departments, zoning officials, and homeowners' associations.