Food Related Bits in the News and in Blogland

The slow food movement's Civil Eats website had a bit a few days ago on Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson's op-ed piece in the New York Times about the damage we're doing to our soil and what it means in terms of our civilization's ability to survive. Jackson's a plant geneticist and president of the Land Institute, while Berry is a farmer and writer whose voice has been gaining significance in discussions of sustainable vs. industrial farming these past few years.
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Marion Nestle recently posted on her blog that the Government Accountability Office just produced a report looking at how federal agencies regulate (or, more importantly, fail to regulate) genetically modified crops. Nestle writes that "[t]he report documents long-standing gaps in coordination and direction among the three regulatory agencies involved: FDA, USDA, and EPA". Read the rest here. This comes just in time for Monsanto's recent attempts to have a strain of drought-resistant corn approved in the United States. Two bits says the report gets forgotten in as long as it takes to air pop a handful of kernels.
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Speaking of corn... The Ethicurean had a blurb a few days ago about how Monsanto's profits have doubled this past quarter and how they currently control 25% of the global market for seed corn. Must be nice.

Wanna start an organic farm?

The Center for Rural Affairs' June 2008 newsletter has a short piece on starting an organic farm (or transitioning to organic farming). There are great resource links at the bottom of the article. The Magdoff book mentioned can be found online for free here; if you want to learn anything about building soil, it's invaluable to anyone who grows food on any scale. Also, the Rodale Institute's website offers a free 15-hour online course on transitioning to organic farming.

Farming in the news

Grist had a decent short article this past week on the United States' urgent need for more farmers. Farmers make up 1.6 percent of the US population right now, and onlyy 5.8 percent of those farmers are under the age of 35. Richard Heinberg addressed the same issue around a year and a half ago in one of his Museletters taken from a lecture he delivered to the E.F. Schumacher Society. The situation is no doubt pretty much the same in Canada, and with food shortages becoming more and more of a concern, and as the need for less oil-reliant agriculture continues to grow as we run out of fossil fuels, we can expect to hear about this a lot more.

The USDA has recently decided to eliminate a program used by everyone from environmental groups to industry and trade groups to trace the use and risk of pesticides. Scaled back in 2007, the collection and analysis of data on food crop pesticide usage in the US was regarded as the only ''reliable, plublicly searchable database of its kind'', according to an article in The Daily Green, which also points out that this comes at a time when herbicide use in Monsanto's near-monopoly of Roundup Ready crops has been increasing.

Ug99 and your loaf of bread

As wheat prices soar, another danger is lurking just around the corner (or across the ocean, to be more precise) -- actual wheat shortages. A fungus called Ug99 has wiped out 70% of Africa's wheat crops, and it's expected that in some areas there, crops will be a total loss. First discovered in 1999 in Uganda, the fungus has already spread to Asia thanks to its wind-borne spores. Scientists are concerned that it will inevitably make its way to Europe and North America.

In a New York Times piece from this past Saturday, Norman E. Borlaug, the Nobel Prize winning and biotech / genetic engineering promoting ''Father of the Green Revolution'', calls for the development of a stem-rust-resistant (no doubt genetically modified) form of wheat and for it to be used to replace ''almost all of the commercial wheat grown in the world today'', for the sake and safety of the global wheat supply.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently handed Cornell University a $26.8 million dollar grant to initiate a three year study to develop (primarily and mostly through genetic modification), a stem-rust-resistant variety. Details of the project are available here in its executive summary.

I'm wondering what all of this will mean for organic wheat farmers.

New Brunswick's Organic Farm Apprenticeship Program

The Falls Brook Centre in Knowlesville, NB is co-hosting the New Brunswick Organic Farm Apprenticeship Program. Taken from a press release:

Have you ever wanted to live the life of an organic farmer, but didn't know where to start? Are you an organic farmer with lots to work and experience to share, but no one to teach? Do you have questions about how to improve areas of organic farming, and ideas for on-farm experiments? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, the Organic Farm Apprenticeship is for you.

Falls Brook Centre (FBC), the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada (OACC), New Brunswick Department of Agriculture (NBDAFA), the Atlantic Canadian Organic Regional Network (ACORN) and New Brunswick Organic Farms have collaborated to design a program to build the Atlantic Canadian organic sector.

Read the rest of it here or for more information (and the application form), see the applicable section of the Falls Brook Centre's website.

Eliot Coleman and The New Organic Grower

I first heard of Eliot Coleman when a friend of mine -- an enthusiastic hands-on student of organic farming practices -- mentioned a book of Coleman's that he'd just picked up a while back. He insisted that it was a must-read for anyone serious about organic gardening or farming. The book was The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener (A Gardener's Supply Book). I've since picked up my own copy, and not only has it left me looking forward to spring when I can get my backyard garden going again, but it's made me excited about the prospect of someday obtaining my own parcel of land and getting out of the city for good.

First published in 1989, then revised in 1995, the book discusses the various methods and techniques which Coleman has gradually developed during his own (more than a) quarter of a century of smallish-scale organic farming on his own land, on others' farms, as well as in more experimental / educational settings. The information in the book is geared towards maximizing productivity and efficiency (e.g. through techniques such as effective crop rotation), without compromising quality or sustainability. Coleman focuses on ways to ''build'' the soil to improve its fertility, and by extension, to improve plant health without falling back on commercial fertilizers (which ultimately ruin the soil) and toxic pesticides. Of particular interest to me (as I gaze out the window at the fresh heap of snow dumped on my small city these past days) is how Coleman, whose small farm is located in Maine, has learned to extend short growing seasons using unheated and (or mostly unheated) mobile greenhouses (amongst other things) so that even an organic farm exposed to harsh New England winters can operate year-round, and do so with with little or no reliance on fossil fuels or expensive machinery.

His book is regarded as the organic farming guide and the information in it is as useful to the urban backyard gardener as it is to the homesteading market farmer with a 1-5 acre farm. He has a ''small is better'' attitude, asserting that 2.5 acres per person is more than enough land to handle and that those 2.5 acres are sufficient to grow a plentiful variety of vegetables capable of feeding up to 100 people for a year! Throughout the book, he describes a farmer's most valuable tools as those of observation and common sense -- to take notice of what works or what doesn't, and while not being afraid to think outside the box, to always, always learn from your mistakes and then use those mistakes to improve your methods. While farming, Coleman would document everything from seeding and harvesting dates to the daily weather and refer to those notes in later years, for instance. For a sneak peak at the book, here's the table of contents (with links to some excerpts) that he features on his Four Season Farm website.

So I've been curious about what led Eliot Coleman to become the organic farmer's organic farmer. Wikipedia offers up some data about him. Other internet explorations led me to find out that it was reading Scott and Helen Nearing's back-to-the-land homesteading classic Living the Good Life in his mid-twenties that triggered his initial interest in growing food. In 1968, he purchased 60 acres of land from them in Harborside, Maine (then selling 20 of those acres at the same price he'd paid for it them). He and his first wife Sue settled in to a simple life of homesteading, clearing the land and using the Nearings' methods as a starting point. The typical daily routine of their first few years there with their young daughter are discussed in this 1971 Mother Earth News article.

The rest of Coleman's life up until the 1990s involved a lot of travel and a variety of pursuits, mostly centered around the practice and politics of organic farming, and some of which I'll likely write about at a later date. For now, I'm looking forward to finishing up this amazing book and putting in a seed order so that I can start planning my own little garden, incorporating some of his methods.

The Future of Agriculture

Anybody with an interest in the future of agriculture -- of food -- in the US (and the rest of the world, really should read this article about the impact of recent budget cuts by the Bush administration on agricultural research in public institutions, and what it means in terms of agribusiness not only increasing its profits at the US taxpayers' expense, but also ultimately curtailing research into areas of farming that aren't wrapped around patents and genetic engineering.

From the article:

The future of agricultural research at America's land-grant institutions belongs to biotech conglomerates like Monsanto. And it seems likely that it's a future of chemical-dependent, genetically modified, bio-engineered agriculture. In stark contrast to how the federal government and many states are wallowing in red ink, the St. Louis-based Monsanto boasted more than $7 billion in annual sales in 2007 -- simply the latest in four years of record-smashing profits. And so when our president says that the time has come for public land-grant institutions to get cracking at "leveraging nonfederal resources," you can be sure that Monsanto's ears perk.

But, it doesn't take a presidential invitation to get Monsanto to sink its roots in the land-grant system. Those roots are already planted. Iowa State's campus boasts a Monsanto Auditorium and the school offers students Monsanto-funded graduate fellowships on seed policy with a special focus on "the protection of intellectual property rights." Kansas State has spun off Wildcat Genetics, a side company whose purpose is the selling of soybean seeds genetically engineered to survive the application of Roundup® -- the result of a decades long relationship with Monsanto, the pesticide's maker.

It looks like the future of organic farming research in North America will be left in the hands of folks like Dr. Elaine Ingham of Soil Foodweb, Inc.. Unfortunately, Soil Foodweb, Inc. isn't churning out the next generation of agricultural scientists, which is why agribusiness' increasing control of American universities and other academic institutions conducting research should be especially worrisome.