(CSA Newsletter: Late Season Week 3)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
What a beautiful week! As I’m writing this on Monday, the sun is shining and it’s over 70° outside! Once again, good weather accompanied our pumpkin patch open house, luring many folks out to enjoy the farm on Sunday. We drank fresh cider from another farm here on the island; people walked through the fields; and kids picked out pumpkins. It was an afternoon to remember for years to come, I’m sure.
Earlier in the weekend, we stepped inside for the afternoon to attend our friends’ workshop at the McMinnville Library, the final talk in the Slow Food Yamhill County’s seasonal series. Seth Johnson and Leslie Blanding of Figment Farm presented ‘Eat Your Lawn,’ a talk focusing on the evils of lawns and how to remove your lawn and turn it into a food garden. Seth and Leslie provided fascinating information about the environmental impact of Americans’ lawns, and they provided tips for making a food garden attractive — useful information for town dwellers who want to remove their front lawn without alienating their neighbors.
While at the library, we also ran across another great book on modern agriculture — Fatal Harvest: the Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, edited by Andrew Kimbrell. The book is available in two sizes — a compact text-only version and a large coffee table sized version with lots of great photographs.
The larger book offers a fascinating series of photographs contrasting the ‘Industrial Eye’ (images of industrial farming) with the ‘Agrarian Eye’ (images of more sustainable farming). The diverse side-by-side comparisons are startling. The images reveal how simple it would be to move from the current system to a healthier version — for example, simply by using crop rotations (mandated for organic growers such as ourselves) and promoting wildlife habitats at the edges of fields.
Much of the book has an alarmist tone offering few caveats — I could see a reader responding negatively to the biased tone. However, enough evidence is provided throughout the book to support the editors’ perspectives that I think it works. And, quite frankly, the state of industrial agriculture should be addressed with alarm — it is an alarming truth that the food sold in stores today is the product of a frightening industry.
Fatal Harvest addresses some of the scary facts behind industrial agricultural most concisely when it describes the ‘Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture.’ Although I recommend reading the extended analysis of each myth, I want to quote the book’s powerful summary of the myths here:
Myth One: Industrial agriculture will feed the world.
The truth: World hunger is not created by lack of food but by poverty and landlessness, which deny people access to food. Industrial agriculture actually increases hunger by raising the cost of farming, by forcing tens of millions of farmers off the land, and by growing primarily high-profit export and luxury crops.
Myth Two: Industrial food is safe, healthy, and nutritious.
The truth: Industrial agriculture contaminates our vegetables and fruits with pesticides, slips dangerous bacteria into our lettuce, and puts genetically engineered growth hormones into our milk. It is not surprising that cancer, food-borne illnesses, and obesity are at an all-time high.
Myth Three: Industrial food is cheap.
The truth: If you added the real cost of industrial food — its health, environmental, and social costs — to the current supermarket price, not even our wealthiest citizens could afford to buy it.
Myth Four: Industrial agriculture is efficient.
The truth: Small farms produce more agricultural output per unit area than large farms. Moreover, larger, less diverse farms require far more mechanical and chemical inputs. These ever increasing inputs are devastating to the environment and make these farms far less efficient than smaller, more sustainable farms.
Myth Five: Industrial food offers more choice.
The truth: What the consumer actually gets in the supermarket is an illusion of choice. Food labeling does not even tell us what pesticides are on our food or what products have been genetically engineered. Most importantly, the myth of choice masks the tragic loss of tens of thousands of crop varieties caused by industrial agriculture.
Myth Six: Industrial agriculture benefits the environment and wildlife.
The truth: Industrial agriculture is the largest single threat to the earth’s biodiversity. Fence-row-to-fence-row plowing, planting, and harvesting techniques decimate wildlife habitats, while massive chemical use poisons the soil and water, and kills off countless plant and animal communities.
Myth Seven: Biotechnology will solve the problems of industrial agriculture.
The truth: New biotech crops will not solve industrial agriculture’s problems, but will compound them and consolidate control of the world’s food supply in the hands of large corporations. Biotechnology will destroy biodiversity and food security, and drive self-sufficient farmers off their land.
… Whew. It’s a good thing the sun is out, or just reading those seven myths would get me down today. Sometimes, when reading about the greater agricultural situation, it’s hard for Casey and me to avoid feeling insignificant — as though we’re tiny little voices crying in a vast, vast wilderness of money, greed, and corporate influences. And, we are tiny in the scheme of things.
Yes, we are very, very small.
But, in the end, I guess that’s the point — the point of Fatal Harvest (which addresses issues of scale at length) and the point of the real, thriving movement working for a healthier agricultural system. If the United States is to ever achieve a real, thriving, secure food system, it will need to involve every community and many people within each community. Industrial agriculture’s scale itself is a problem, so farms must be small to counter its influence. Small and diverse. Farms will need to look like ours (17.5 acres worked by two laborers and two tractors) and also like Seth and Leslie’s (2 acres worked by many laborers with hand tools).
By necessity, getting the information and how-to knowledge out there to foster such a change will be slower to implement than planting a thousand acre field of corn. It will require many voices and teachers (which is why we gave the series of talks this summer), and will offer many solutions.
But once the information is out there, watch out. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people will have the power to grow food for themselves and their communities. A table with millions of legs is hard to knock over; similarly, a food system with millions of growers is secure.
That is the point of real food security — it isn’t about protecting grain silos from terrorists or irradiating contaminated foods to make them ‘safe.’ Food security is about eating food grown close to home by community members who actually care about the health of their eaters.
Watching our many CSA children pick out their jack o’ lanterns this weekend is just one of the many events that keep Casey and me accountable for our farming techniques. These children eat the food we grow, and they will be our future farmers, doctors, and teachers. How can I watch them play in the sun and not want to provide them the healthiest, safest food possible?
On a day such as today — brilliant sun lighting up our almost tidy rows of fall cabbages and broccoli — working for an alternative healthier agriculture seems almost possible. We’ll keep on truckin’ towards our goals. Thank you, as always, for joining us in this important work. Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
P.S. Care about these and other issues? Make your voice heard and VOTE this week! After you pick up your CSA share next Tuesday, join us at Red Fox Bakery (328 NE Evans St in downtown McMinnville) to await the results with my mom Kris Bledsoe, candidate for Yamhill County Commissioner. The party starts at 7 pm. There will be food, wine and good people. VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!
Thank you a million times for what you do. In the past year, we have completely revitalized how we eat eating very little food that we or you did not produce yourselves. I was blessed with the gift of knowledge of animal husbandry and it has completely changed our lives.
It has been a challenge learning to eat meats we don’t always eat or eating vegetables that I have had to try to cook several times before being able to tolerate, but the satisfaction that the food is coming from people who care about the food and the production of it, matters.
You aren’t a small voice, you provide food for an entire community. More importantly, you provide community to the community. Bravo.