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Intensive Urban Farming Catches On in Idaho

May 22, 2009 in Resilient Community by DJ | No comments

Gallery Picture
(Photo source:Urban farmer Kipp Nash in Boulder, CO.)

Deseret News carries an article about intensive urban farming in Boise.  Also called “small plot intensive” farming, or SPIN, urban farming typically uses plots of less than one acre, often rented from the owner, to produce food for sale in local markets.  Often the farmer barters for the land, giving the owner part of the crops produced.   

Small farming is conducive to organic farming methods, improving the quality of the crops and reducing the impact on the environment– not to mention that locally-grown food requires little if any trucking to get to market.  And the economic downturn seems to favor local farming.  The article reports, “This year there are 46 farmers markets in Idaho, up from 35 last year.”

Roxanne Christianson, co-author of the SPIN Farming Learning Guides, says,

“What makes SPIN different from other commercial vegetable farming methods, and uniquely suited to the citizen-farmer, is that it makes it possible to generate significant income from sub-acre land masses. With SPIN, farmers do not need much land to start their commercial operations. More importantly, they don’t need to own any land at all; they can affordably rent or even barter their land base from neighbors, friends and relatives. There’s something about SPIN-Farming that proves irresistible to family members, they start hanging out at your plots, and pretty soon they’re ripe for productive use! SPIN also greatly reduces the need for capital… SPIN therefore removes the 2 big barriers to entry for new farmers – they don’t need a lot of land or money.”

She goes on to describe the people urban farming appeals to, not necessarily the Birkenstock-wearing, granola-eating types:

The new citizen-farmers… recognize that cities are impulsive, boisterous, spontaneous, and competitive, while agriculture is plodding, tranquil, deliberate and deferential. And they are capable of envisioning a world where for one to be right, the other does not have to be wrong.

SpinFarming.com offers a wealth of resources on SPIN farming, reminding us that farming can take place just about anywhere.   

Perhaps what makes the emergence of urban farming in Boise so remarkable is that organic farming is typically thought of in connection with liberal, climate change consciousness– and Idaho (where John McCain took 61% of the vote in 2008) is about as far from liberal as you can get.

Perhaps this is a reminder that environmentalism and conservatism have a great deal of common ground.

Where Your Food Comes From

May 14, 2009 in Resilient Community by DJ | No comments

Do you know where your food comes from?  Most people don’t– and most of us don’t think too much about it.  Those frozen chickens we buy at the store may be sprouted in fields in California for all we know.

Of course, that’s not where chickens come from.  They are live animals raised on farms (or in factories) by and for live people.

Everything we eat comes from somewhere, employs someone, and has environmental consequences both where it’s grown and to the planet as a whole.  So it’s worthwhile to think about what we’re putting in our mouths. 

Where does this food come from?  Who grew it or raised it?  How humanely were the animals treated?  How far did it have to travel to get to your plate?  Did they add any ingredients you can’t pronounce?  These are questions that should be second nature to us. 

But they’re not.  We’ve become a culture that thinks more about convenience that about consequences.  The only question we really ask (perhaps less often than we once did) is: “Do I have the money to afford this?” 

Next time you’re at the grocery store wandering the produce aisle, ask the manager where the produce came from: was it locally grown, or trucked in from California or flown from another country?  Did it create a job for someone in your vicinity, or is your dollar headed somewhere else far away? 

Read the label on the meat: does it come from a local family farm, or from a national corporation?  Do you think they treated their animals the way you would?

Think about the hydrogenated oils in that prepared frozen dinner.  Is that really what you want to put in your mouth?

The Gift of Labor in Nepal

March 26, 2009 in Resilient Community by DJ | No comments

Applying the principles of Sarvodaya originating with M. K. “Mahatma” Gandhi in India and refined by Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne in Sri Lanka, a group of students in Nepal helps a village repair a 30-year-old footpath to their village. All they bring is the gift of labor– the rest of the resources, including food for the laborers, aare present in the community.

“We build the road, the road builds us.”

(Note: One spokesperson’s name is “Swastika,” the name of an ancient Hindu symbol. In Asia, the swastika has no political or ethnic connotations as it does in Europe; it remains in important religious symbol.)

Free Market Mania Contributes to Starvation

March 24, 2009 in Economics, Peace and Justice, Resilient Community by DJ | No comments

Dirt.biscuit
(Image source: A Haitian woman makes biscuits out of clay.)

“Agriculture and food markets aren’t like markets for clothes or automobiles. Food is a daily essential, which consumes as much as two-thirds of the income of the poorest half of the world. Many of those poor people are also peasants who rely on food production for their livelihoods…  What’s more, wide disparities in power, financial resources and information exist between the many small producers and the handful of giant multinationals that control grain trade (like Cargill), hybrid seeds (like Monsanto), chemicals (like DuPont), wholesale markets (like Archer Daniels Midland) and retail markets (like Wal-Mart or Carrefour).  Add to that the distortions of markets in favor of the giants through governmental policies and the growing role of huge speculative investors.” –In These Times.

Around the world the scenario plays out about the same: Following the model of free market capitalism promoted by our leaders, poor nations encourage a shift from subsistence farming to cash crops and industry.  They need cheap labor in order to compete with all the other poor nations for factories.  They need people to leave their farms, lose their source of food, and get desperate enough to work long hours for obscenely low pay.

In the slums of Colombo, Sri Lanka, so many people live in an apartment that they can’t all lie down at the same time– they sleep in shifs.  In Bangkok, Thailand, they turn to the sex trade for income.  In India, some cripple their own children because they’ll make more money begging than they could possibly make working.  In Mexico, where 60% of the country lives at or below the poverty level, they risk their lives to cross the border to the Promised Land to the north.

But these free markets have a negative effect on us, the consumer, as well.  When you can’t find a job, perhaps it is because some poor ex-farmer thousands of miles away took it– for far less money.

Two-thirds of U.S. economic activity is consumer spending.  We don’t manufacture much anymore.  Sadly, with government-subsidized transportation, it’s cheaper to bring goods in from far away than to pay an American to make it locally.

But we do have alternatives.  We can buy local goods wherever possible.  And when they cost a little more, just remember that they’re lowering your tax bill because they need no government sibsidies and they help prevent unemployment.

What does buying local do for those poor factory workers overseas?  Nothing.  But it just might help prevent more farmers from leaving their farms for the misery of urban slavery.

A Different Kind of Investment

March 23, 2009 in Reduce Reuse Recycle, Resilient Community by DJ | No comments

Produce! by Wiedmaier.
(Weidmeir photo.)

SmartMoney.com suggests seven things we spend money on wastefully.  On most, I agree: bottled water, extended warranties, and gym memberships are expenses that make little economic sense.

But on the subject of organic produce, SM says it’s a waste of money unless there’s dangerous pesticide residue on the produce itself.

“Fruits and vegetables like kiwis, sweet corn and broccoli require very little pesticide to grow. Others — like avocados, onions and pineapples — have thick or peelable skins that reduce your exposure to harmful chemicals.”

In other words, if it’s not directly harmful to us, the purchaser, we shouldn’t care about our food’s effect on the environment. All that fossil fuel used for making fertilizer on conventional crops? Ignore it. The farm workers poisoned by pesticides that are either washed off or external on the produce we buy? Who cares.

Such a view is, to say the least, short-sighted. The benefit of organic produce isn’t just our own health– it’s the health of farm workers, the environment, and even our economy. It’s a good investment, especially when grown locally.

Pecans: Local Protein

February 21, 2009 in Global Warming, Resilient Community by DJ | No comments

Local food offers many benefits: better taste and nutrition, lower carbon footprint, and a more dynamic local economy.  In many cases, locally-grown food also uses less chemical fertilizer and pesticide than industrially-grown foods.

In our quest for local foods, we tried to find a local source of vegetable protein.  There are two: pine nuts, indigenous to the local mountains, and pecans, grown in orchards to the south of us.  We missed pine nut season, but we found a pecan grower who’d had a great season and still had plenty of nuts left. 

On a trip to St. George earlier in the week, I swung through the town of Hurricane and picked up a 20-pound bag of unshelled pecans.  The source of the nuts was obvious: the grower’s home was surrounded by pecan trees. 

When I brought them home, my wife commented, “Now that’s what a pecan ought to taste like!”  The price: $1.20 per pound.  And we’ve got enough for nearly a year of baking, cooking, and snacking.

Where Vegans Are Right

January 29, 2009 in Global Warming, Reduce Reuse Recycle, Resilient Community by DJ | No comments

From 1990-2000 I was vegetarian.  In 1994 I went through a period of veganism, though not by choice.  I was living in Sri Lanka, where they eat fish and lentils for protein, with a little dairy for those who can afford it.  I didn’t eat fish, so I ate the lentils and purchased yogurt from local shops.  But because I ate more yogurt than several Sri Lankans combined, before long the local shops ran out of yogurt and I lived on rice, lentils, and vegetable curries. 

After several weeks, I began to get dizzy spells, couldn’t think clearly, and ran out of energy quickly.  The only thing I had changed in my diet was the involuntary elimination of dairy.  A friend found someone with a cow who was willing to bring a glass of milk for me each morning, and the symptoms soon disappeared. 

Recently, I learned that even while eating dairy and some meat and added supplements, the level of Vitamin B-12 in my body hovers just below the recommended minimum.  For some reason, I don’t absorb B-12 well.  So it’s no surprise that in the absence of foods containing B-12, I very quickly developed symptroms of deficiency.  Now, when vegans tell me that humans weren’t meant to eat meat or dairy, I wonder why then we need Vitamin B-12, which (apart from industrial synthesis) can’t be found in a vegan diet.

But that doesn’t mean I have no appreciation for what vegans are saying.  Take, for example, this passage from the Vegan Society website:

“People are increasingly becoming aware of the direct correlation between what they eat every day and the health of the planet. Environmentally conscious consumers are concerned not only with food miles, over-packaging, pesticide use and GM foods, but also question the environmental sustainability of modern animal husbandry. Farmers used to be seen as ‘custodian’s of the countryside,’ but the overriding image of modern industrial farming is one of destruction and waste.”

I agree 100%.  And this:

“A report commissioned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank concluded that factory farming, ‘acts directly on land, water, air and biodiversity through the emission of animal waste, use of fossil fuels and substitution of animal genetic resources. In addition, it affects the global land base indirectly through its effect on the arable land needed to satisfy its feed concentrate requirements. Ammonia emissions from manure storage and application lead to localized acid rain and ailing forests.’”

No argument from me. In fact, if we are to survive the challenges ahead, we must carefully look at what we eat and where it comes from. Factory farming is a means to gain the most volume of food from the least amount of area– and, unsurprisingly, it’s not sustainable. Like using amphetamines to increase one’s energy, there comes a point at which the system crashes from lack of resources.

Environmental health demands that we eat less meat. That said, I’m not ready to extrapolate that to eliminating meat or dairy completely.  As a pragmatist, I look at the demands of the environment– less trucking, elimination of factory farming, and reduction of fossil fuel use (including fertilizers)– and suggest that there is a point of balance at which consumption of dairy and even some meat can be nondestructive to the environment, and even beneficial.   That point includes far, far less meat than we as a culture consume today, but it’s still this side of no meat at all.

For those who are philosophically opposed to meat and dairy consumption, I won’t stand in the way of your right to choose. But my objection to intensive monoculture farming (animal and vegetable) doesn’t extend to the complete elimination of certain types of food. Much like the difference between alcoholism and a social drinker, I don’t equate CAFOs with an occasional cheese.

Lost Knowledge

January 28, 2009 in Gardening, Resilient Community by DJ | No comments

Open Gallery...
(Photo from www.kommersant.com.)

A reader writes:

It seems to me that in 20th century’s rush to industrialize and replace family farmers with industrial farming, the US population has lost a lot of useful knowledge.

I was talking to a Russian man in my classes yesterday as we rode the Bart home from school. He mentioned that South San Franciscans use their land near criminally– nobody has a garden, and if they do, it’s grass sprayed with chemicals. (Sad but true.) In Moscow, he said, it is very common to own in addition to ones home or apartment, a small plot of land outside the city for a garden — everybody gardens, he said. “Onions, potatoes — so easy to grow. You just throw them on the ground, they grow!”

He told me two canning techniques they use — cut up cabbages, and layer the pieces with salt and carrot in a large glass jar, 1 gallon or more in size. No water, that’s it. Cabbage keeps all winter. One recipe is cabbage, onion and meat fried up in a pan — another is to have meat, potatoes, and boiled cabbage. I’m sure there are nuances to the recipes that I missed (his English isn’t great, and my Russian is none.)

Another canning technique — sounded similar to the nitrogen canning you mentioned — was to put a stub of a burning candle in a jar or grain, close the lid, and remove the oxygen that way.

I hadn’t heard of either of these methods, and thought I’d pass them along.

Thanks!  Surely we’ve gotten spoiled by having fruits and vegetables trucked to us (and now flown to us) all year round.   We no longer have to worry much about preserving– we can pay for foods to come from someplace where they’re still in season!

A quick internet search revealed this recipe for Russian-style cabbage and onions, with or without meat.  I’m sure there are others.

Utah Sales Tax Favors Local Growers

January 27, 2009 in Resilient Community, Tax Issues by DJ | No comments

Farmers' Market Dallas, Texas by muddbutter.
(Muddbutter photo.)

Our goat ranch qualifies for an agricultural exemption for sales tax purposes: almost anything we buy for use directly in our farming business is exempt from sales tax.  While I researched one aspect of that regulation, I discovered an unrelated but very interesting aspect of Utah’s sales tax law:

Local growers selling produce at farmer’s market don’t have to charge sales tax.  The exemption applies, says the Utah site, to:

“seasonal sales of garden, farm, or other agricultural produce [and] is limited to locally grown produce sold during the harvest season, at locations where only locally grown produce is sold.

That gives local producers a slight advantage over megafarms: their produce costs 6% less to the consumer, who pays no sales tax.  Plus, they save on the cost of doing their periodic sales tax returns. 

Megafarms have advantages of scale, government subsidies, and maket control, so it’s good to see Utah giving local farmers an edge.

What Will It Take?

January 23, 2009 in Resilient Community by DJ | No comments

fremont community garden by wetgraphite.
(Wetgraphite photo: Community garden in Sacramento, CA.)

SusHI, another blogger dedicated to sustainable communties, wonders what it will take to get us to change our ways.

“Now that we’re fairly-well up-to-speed and have clearly in-hand the full range of knowledge needed to address our challenges, what should we do next? Have another conference?… Frankly, I’m embarrased by how little we’ve accomplished…”

He wonders whether our reliance on (or attention to) outside experts distracts us from the real work at hand, “a full-on collaborative, multi-sector strategic thrust down our pathways toward sustainability.” 

I agree.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s nothing we can learn from outside– clearly there’s much to be learned from sharing experience.  But sustainability really is a local process, and that means the answers will be found in our own community.  Doing is as much a part of learning as talking.

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