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Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry: A 50-Year Farm Bill
Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, New York Times
… Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.
To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.
Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.
Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.
For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.
Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.
But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.
Wes Jackson is a plant geneticist and president of The Land Institute in Salina, Kan. Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer in Port Royal, Ky.
(4 January 2009)
Both authors should be recognized as National Treasures. -BA
Peak soil
David Montgomery, New Internationalist
In a world plagued with worries about depleting resources, having enough dirt to go round seems like the least of our problems. David Montgomery dissents.
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Oil is what most of us think of as a strategic resource, yet in the long run it is soil which is the more important. Even so, people’s eyes tend to glaze over when talk turns to soil conservation, maybe because it’s so much easier to see the immediate relevance of rising gas prices and climate change in these days of peak oil. So while public attitudes on climate change have shifted dramatically over the past few years, a crisis in global agriculture remains hidden: we are, and have long been, using up the supply of topsoil we rely on to grow our food.
Those of us living in modern cities can easily forget that without fertile soil we could not survive. Yet modern agricultural techniques are eroding the very soil on which food production depends. This ongoing soil loss means we face the problem of feeding a growing population from a shrinking land base. This should be troubling because even a casual reading of history shows that, under the right circumstances, climatic extremes, political turmoil or resource abuse can bring down a society. And in the century ahead we face all three, as shifting climate patterns and depleted oil supplies coincide with progressive loss of farmland.
We have, in effect, been ‘mining’ soil for much of human history. Indeed, the decline in fertility and loss of agricultural lands through wind and water erosion is a problem as old as agriculture itself. Civilizations from Babylon to Easter Island have proven only as durable as the fertility of their land. The Roman Empire left Eastern Mediterranean agriculture in a state from which it has yet to recover. But the problem of soil loss is not just ancient history. Exacerbated by modern industrial farming, global agricultural soil loss of about a millimetre per year outpaces soil formation by at least tenfold.
Over the past century, the effects of long-term soil erosion were masked by bringing new land under cultivation and by developing fertilizers, pesticides and crop varieties to compensate for declining soil productivity. However, such ‘agrotech’ fixes become progressively more difficult to maintain because crop yields decline exponentially as soil thins.
(December 2008)
A Change We Can Believe In – Dumping Industrial Agriculture
Jim Goodman, Common Dreams.org
As 2009 approaches, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes nearly a billion people a day go hungry worldwide. While India supplies Switzerland with 80% of its wheat, 350 million Indians are food-insecure. Rice prices have nearly tripled since early 2007 because, according to The International Rice Research Institute, rice-growing land is being lost to industrialization, urbanization and shifts to grain crops for animal feed.
Yet, according to FAO statistics, world food supplies have kept pace with population growth. There is enough food to adequately feed everyone. Clearly, root causes of the food crisis lie in politics, problems with food distribution, poverty and a failure of the industrial food system to deliver its promises.
(30 December 2008)
Community Food Co-op establishes stronger foothold in local grocery industry with opening of second store in north Bellingham
Dave Gallagher, The Bellingham Herald
It’s been a long time coming, but Jeff Voltz hopes the new Community Food Co-op store in the Cordata neighborhood was worth the wait.
…Voltz believes people have been adjusting to the changes in the economy, choosing to save money by cooking at home more.
…”We continue to pound out the message about how we’re different – we offer local products and we’ve become more aggressive in terms of prices. We have to continue to define ourselves as giving local farm producers a shot at breaking into the market,” Voltz said.
…A co-op is a little more stable than even grocery stores in general during a recession because we can rely on our membership base. Whether it’s because of organic, fair-trade or our focus on local products, our membership has standards that are very important to them, so they continue to shop here.
We may have to change our mix of products, however – offering more basic foods, for example, as people change spending habits.
(4 January 2009)
Do food co-ops makes more sense in the current economic climate in addition to the other excellent reasons for joining and/or starting one up? KS.
