A grower of All Blue, Butte, Caribe, Russian Banana and a host of other organic and heirloom seed potatoes, Gerritsen is also president of the Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association (OSGATA), lead plaintiff among 83 North American family farmers, seed businesses, and organic agriculture organizations in a potentially groundbreaking lawsuit, Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto, that’s just recently seen its first day in federal court.

This lawsuit is an “attempt to come up with a strategy to protect family farmers in this perverse situation we find ourselves in,” said Gerritsen, “whereby our crops can become contaminated by Monsanto’s transgenic seed, and beyond losing the value of our organic or non-GMO crops, we’re placed in the position of having to defend ourselves from a Monsanto-initiated patent infringement lawsuit. We need protection from the courts to prevent that injustice.”

I asked him to elaborate.

“It’s a preemptive lawsuit filed under the Declaratory Judgement Act, which allows people who are fearful of sometime in the future being sued, to petition the court for protection, in this case from their GMO contamination. We want them to keep their pollution on their side of the fence…we shouldn’t have to defend ourselves in court because of their trespass.”

According to the complaint against Monsanto filed by the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), a non-profit, public interest legal group representing the plaintiffs in this case, the biotechnology behemoth’s aggressive, litigious behavior in protecting its seed patents over the years has forced the plaintiffs to take legal action.

The suit states that “roughly 500 farmers are investigated [by Monsanto] for patent infringement each year. Between 1997 and April 2010, Monsanto filed 144 lawsuits against farmers in at least 27 different states” for alleged patent infringement and/or the breach of its license to those patents. Additionally, the complaint documents Monsanto’s pattern of “investigation, accusation, and litigation” against other farmers who neither wished to possess, nor be contaminated by Monsanto’s GMO seed.

One case cited in the lawsuit and presented by the plaintiffs as indicative of Monsanto’s hyperactive legal strategy involved Indiana farmers, David and Dawn Runyon.  The Runyons became widely known after being featured in a CBS Evening News report in 2008, and then again in the popular documentary released the summer of 2009, Food Inc. In their case, according to a CBS transcript, “The Runyons charge bio-tech giant Monsanto sent investigators to their home unannounced, demanded years of farming records, and later threatened to sue them for patent infringement.”

The only problem was the Runyons never purchased Monsanto seed, never signed any agreement to grow the company’s genetically modified soybeans, and never gave permission to anyone from Monsanto to take samples of the Runyons’ soybean crop. Monsanto at one point sent the family a letter claiming to have an agreement with the Indiana Department of Agriculture allowing the corporation to take samples from the Runyon farm, although the agency did not exist at the time the letter was sent. Monsanto now states it has declared the Runyons “ineligible to purchase our technology.”

On January 31, lawyers for both sides of the Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto case presented oral arguments before the court on a pre-trial motion by Monsanto to dismiss the lawsuit. The attorney for Monsanto, Seth Waxman, argued the farmers and other plaintiffs lacked a valid reason to fear being sued, as it was not a “ubiquitous threat,” ignoring the “intimidation effect” of the corporation’s litigiousness, according to the plaintiff’s attorney, Dan Ravicher of PUBPAT.

Farmer and OSGATA chief, Jim Gerritsen, commented after the day’s proceedings that it was that kind of intimidation which organic and non-GMO farmers needed protection from. “We have farmers who have stopped growing organic corn, organic canola, and organic soybeans because they can’t risk being sued by Monsanto. It’s not fair and it’s not right.”

In our conversation earlier, Gerritsen expressed his optimism about the case, citing a number of events worldwide which, he argued, heralded a dramatic shift in public opinion around the issue of GMO foods–a recent unanimous vote in Peru for a ten-year moratorium on GMOs; French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s public commitment to place new restrictions on GMOs in France; the Label GMOs initiative in California, for which supporters will soon begin gathering signatures; and finally the Occupy movement, which he believes has irrevocably altered the whole conversation around food and democracy.

“I think the Occupy movement has been recognized by Americans to be asking the right questions. The polls that I’ve read suggest a majority of Americans support raising issues of corporate control over our government and economy being out of control, and that power needs to shift back to the people. I think it’s creating an atmosphere where we’re not satisfied with just maintaining a status quo that is working against the people. There is no human-created institution which can remain standing when the people stand united in opposition to it.”

Judge Naomi Buchwald has promised to rule on the motion to dismiss the lawsuit by March 31.

The two lobby groups, the Security Industry and Financial Markets Association and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association have challenged the extremely controversial position limits rule, which the CFTC passed in a narrow 3-2 vote this October. Wall Street has recruited the lawfirm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, whose lawyers Miguel Estrada (among Bush’s counsel in Bush v. Gore) and Eugene Scalia (who overturned a Securities and Exchange Commission rule earlier this year) are determined to hold the scepter of market regulation at bay.

The rule caps the total future interest of a given commodity (such as wheat, corn, soy, etc.) a market participant can hold, aimed at preventing “excessive speculation” in those markets. Position limit supporters argue that their absence in recent years has led to price volatility and price spikes, such as the 2008 food crisis that plunged millions of the world’s most vulnerable people deeper into abject poverty, and rising oil prices which in turn drive up the price of food.

Why Position Limits?

Commodity futures exchanges are stocked with two types of traders: Hedgers and speculators. Farmers have long accepted hedging in commodity futures as a way of hedging risk, by selling off future interests (the earliest derivative contracts) in those commodities the burden of production is shared and the farmer ensured a fair price. But wherever futures exchanges were established the threat of speculation was always near.

Japan was home to the first futures exchange in Osaka in the 1730s, however the action of speculators led to famine and food riots, and over time strict controls were developed to protect both farmers and consumers. Recognition of commodity futures speculation prompted the U.S. Commodity Exchange Act 1936, and position limits were established for 28 commodities markets.

By the early 90s free trade ideology had exposed much of the Third World to cheap agribusiness exports. Secret exemptions from position limits for a new Goldman Sachs commodity index fund were allowed on the rationale that they too constituted bona fide hedging. Sixteen other large institutional investors soon received the same exemption. By 2004, cracks started to show in the housing market, and investors began moving money into commodities, spawning an enormous, unregulated and extremely profitable “shadow market.”

By purchasing huge amounts of imaginary wheat, corn, rice or any other commodity and sitting on the contracts for long enough to create an artificial price shock, these enormous “noise” investors were able to impact the price of future contracts to such an extent that real prices followed suit. One congressional staffer estimated that by 2008 80 percent of the market was made up by speculators.

As huge amounts of money entered these markets price volatility went critical. Real prices of Third World staple foods saw unprecedented rises–between 2005 and 2008 maize nearly tripled, wheat increased by 127 percent and rice by 170 percent. Food riots erupted in Mozambique and Haiti, killing hundreds. The 2007-08 food crisis drove 40 million people to hunger a further 20 million to extreme poverty. In 2010 these spikes returned, peaking in early 2011. In 2010 Goldman Sachs is estimated to have made $1 billion from these dangerous gambles.

There are other relevant factors influencing these graphic price spikes, such as biofuel subsidies, crop shortfalls from natural disasters and climate change, and increasing demand, especially for resource-intensive food. The financial industry attributes the crisis to these traditional “supply and demand fundamentals,” and their complaint highlights these fundamentals as driving price volatility. However, despite the vocal protestations of lobby groups in Washington and their vociferous report writing, a growing body of academic literature has observed the dynamic at work.

A Battle of Ideas

The current complaint alleges that the CFTC misinterpreted the existing law, mistaken in believing it was required to institute position limits. Comments from former Commissioner Michael V. Dunn (who stepped down in October) demonstrate this confusion, claiming that although he couldn’t logically justify passing position limits, he believed he was bound to it. Wall Street argues the limits are required only “as appropriate” if “necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent” “any undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce” caused by “[e]xcessive speculation.” First you must prove the limits’ necessity, and then establish limits as appropriate.

Industry claims that position limits are unnecessary because there is “no empirical basis to conclude excessive speculation had burdened modern markets in any way,” citing evidence from CME Group (which owns and operates large derivatives and futures) that “virtually unanimous academic agreement that commodity price changes have been driven by fundamental market conditions, not speculation.” Industry argues that ensuring market liquidity is critical to ensure “price discovery” functions are maintained, and that the CFTC failed to present a reasoned analysis, locking them out of the rule-making process. Further, it claims the CFTC didn’t carry out an adequate cost-benefit analysis, as restructuring would cost $100 million.

The claim of “virtually unanimous academic agreement” is somewhat specious, rather demonstrating the power of the financial lobby to shape the debate. The Sunlight Foundation counted over 13,000 comment letters to the CFTC regarding the rule. Chief Commissioner Gary Gensler estimated that it has prompted approximately 1,000 CFTC meetings, and the “vast majority are from large financial institutions.” A voluminous body of reports issued by financial firms and their legal teams eloquently condemn market regulation in a way that farmers and consumers simply cannot compete with. Data from The Center for Responsive Politics indicates that in 2011 alone lobbying firms have issued 175 separate reports on commodities.

Still, a wide cross-section of academics, activists, non-governmental organizations, former traders and international institutions have argued that excessive speculation, and not market fundamentals, causes commodity price spikes. The World Bank conjectures that index fund activity “…played a key role during the 2008 spike … [a]nd we find no evidence that alleged stronger demand by emerging economies has had any effect on world prices”. UNCTAD states that “financial investment in commodity trading appears to have caused commodity futures exchanges to function in such a way that prices may deviate, at least in the short run, quite far from levels that would reliably reflect fundamental supply and demand factors.” Nongovernmental organizations, such as the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the World Development Movement and Oxfam have joined others include the IMF, U.S. Senate, the UN FAO, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and rockstar economists such as Jayati Ghosh, Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini to highlight of the connection.

Does Liquidity Ensure Price Stability?

The industry’s central argument is the claim that greater market liquidity helps the process of “price discovery.” A recent working paper from the Political Economy Research Institute argues that this position doesn’t take into account the role of investor psychology in determining asset prices, including a “strong desire to accept evidence that could earn traders lots of money.”

Beyond observing “a strong and obvious correlation between the increase in liquidity in these commodity futures markets and the rapid rise of prices in spot markets,” they argue that price volatility was relatively steady prior to the market liquidity bubble witnessed in the 2000s. They conclude that the industry’s position cannot be supported by the “strong and consistent descriptive evidence in support of the need to limit the huge increases in trading volumes on futures markets through effective regulations.”

The System on Trial

Cases like this hold many hurdles, as the poorest and most aggrieved victims of this dangerous trading have no practical power to mount a credible legal challenge against the financial industry’s endless resources. The revolving door between New York and Washington, D.C is such that the majority of its commissioners have held high-ranking spots in financial firms, cheering on or indeed overseeing the deregulation of commodity futures in the first place. The CFTC itself has no broader interest in Third World hunger, but recognizes that excessive speculation can burden interstate commerce.

Still, the message on commodity futures speculation is spreading and increasingly appears as a key lever of hunger and social unrest in our time. Research has linked conflict and revolution in the Middle East and North Africa to food price spikes (Egypt, for example, is the world’s biggest importer of wheat). It is an issue on which both farmers and consumers have a stake in, as the profits Wall Street makes from commodities futures gambling eats into their livelihoods.

This is the opportunity to that crack down on legitimate corporate profiteering–to put the system on trial–and the battle to control the dialogue is well and truly on. To countervail the voices of financial lobbyists, the Occupy movement has made it a key demand building popular power around the issue. Wall Street will not give up their profits easily, yet the power of people too hungry to listen to market liquidity mumbojumbo could prove a formidable barrier. If this power can be channeled, the CFTC’s first lawsuit might not be the one-sided battle it first appears to be.

The case underscores one of the major problems with CAFOs, which is the massive amount of manure they produce and the manners by which operators dispose of it, which have major environmental implications. According to the EPA, “a single dairy cow produces approximately 120 pounds of wet manure per day,” which is “equivalent to that of 20-40 people.” The quantity of manure produced by one dairy cow can be multiplied on a CAFO by hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of heads. This higher concentration of CAFO animals leads to a higher concentration of animal waste, a problem that holds true for all types of livestock raised in these operations. As CARE describes the scale of the waste problem:

Operations like the Nelson Faria Dairy produce as much waste as a city of over 200,000 people. Unlike cities, however, which treat their wastes, the dairy industry applies manure to agricultural fields primarily to get rid of it.

In moderation, manure is a great soil fertilizer, but the sheer amount (and concentration) of untreated waste generated by CAFOs is a serious liability. When too much manure is spread out over fields for soil to properly absorb it, or when manure lagoons leak, overflow or rupture, rain and stormwater runoff can carry the waste into groundwater and nearby waterways. This over-application or discharge of CAFO animal waste is an egregious example of nonpoint source (NPS) pollution, where the source(s) is diffuse and can have a wide distribution area. Untreated animal waste is a hazard for both public health and ecosystems because it can contain harmful quantities of nutrients, pathogens and heavy metals. (Ecocentric has covered the problems associated with large amounts of untreated CAFO animal waste.)

The case of the improper handling of manure on the Nelson Faria Dairy is typical of the CAFO industry. While state and federal animal waste rules exist, their enforcement is lax at best. As CARE President, Helen Reddout, explained:

The Washington Department of Agriculture had recently inspected the dairy and found that it was doing an excellent job managing its manure. Nothing could be further from the truth…It is now time for the agencies who are supposed to be protecting our health to follow the precedent set by this Order. Our state and federal laws were aimed at protecting people and now it’s time for the agencies responsible for safeguarding public health to do just that.

Reddout goes on to explain the reality of state agency CAFO inspections:

Washington Departments of Ecology and Agriculture (WSDA) are supposed to monitor and regulate the dairy industry to ensure that operations do not harm public health or the environment. Unfortunately, inspections often involve nothing more than cursory visits by WSDA staff. If problems are found, dairy owners receive only a slap on the wrist, at best.

The hope is that this court victory against CAFO manure handling and pollution – little mentioned in the media – will help set a precedent toward better practices, regulation and enforcement of the CAFO industry. Reddout acknowledges that this court victory is one small step, albeit an important one, that shows that CAFOs aren’t above the law and puts them on notice for pollution practices, a particularly big deal for the economically (and thus politically) strong Yakima Valley dairy industry. Based on the compelling evidence of agricultural water contamination in the Lower Yakima Valley, and bolstered by the recent ruling, the EPA selected the area for inclusion in a study monitoring nitrate pollution in groundwater. Reddout expects the EPA report to be released in late Spring 2012.

CARE and their allies in the Royal City area deserve our congratulations for this major legal victory that may ultimately inspire a regulatory approach to CAFOs capable of safeguarding human and ecological health. Government agencies must acknowledge the great harm cased by CAFO pollution and hold the industry accountable for the true costs CAFOs impose upon the public.

As expressed by CARE’s lead attorney, Charlie Tebbutt, “Citizens have once again proven that the CAFO industry is a huge polluter. It is time for the state agencies to step up.”

To find out how many CAFOs are in your area, check out Food & Water Watch’s Factory Farm Map:

http://www.factoryfarmmap.org/

**********

Legal Documents

Memorandum of Decision (PDF)

Order of Decision (PDF)

Background and Resources

Hidden Wells, Dirty Waters (Yakima Herald online resource that includes a contaminated well  map and various investigative reports on the issue.)

“Farmers Put up Stink Over Stench” (background article from Seattle Times, Wednesday, July 7, 2004)

Socially Responsible Agricultural Project – Washington

Originally published on Ecocentric

In case you think pickling is just another excuse to put Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein in goofy wigs, think again. Along with products like jam, flour, and beef jerky, pickles count as “value-added” foods, and they’re at the core of what it will take for the local food movement to mature beyond an easily parodied trend.

You see, without these higher-value, less perishable products, farmers and ranchers working at a small, sustainable scale and selling their products locally can rarely make a real living. In addition to the home food preservation trend, small businesses are also working to fill the gaps that exist between heavily processed, industrial foods and local produce—and the result is often minimally processed “value-added products.” Such products allow farmers to extend their season, providing a way for locavore consumers to, say, eat peaches in February, and—perhaps more important—providing a product for farmers to sell long after peach season is gone.

Not that it’s easy to expand a farm operation in that way. It takes seed funding, market testing, and food safety chops to grow your business. That’s where—believe it or not—our government is trying to help.

On Friday, as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food effort, USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan announced the largest allotment of grants for value-added producers in recent history: nearly 300 grants across 44 states and Puerto Rico—to the tune of $44 million.

The Value Added Producer Grant Program has been around since 2000, and has seen increased funding with each successive farm bill since.

Merrigan announced the grants at The Many Faces of Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, a one-day conference hosted at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The event focused on “successful models, resources, strategies and opportunities for supporting, cultivating and growing local/regional food systems in the Midwest.”

Merrigan, whom I spoke with after the event, sees the grants as a critical piece of the concrete good USDA can do to make the local food movement stick.

“These grants are just some of the tools in USDA’s tool kits to help farmers. More value-added products increase their bottom lines,” she told me. “Like the kid who has a pumpkin operation, who grows up and develops a pumpkin puree product so there’s year-round business.”

The grants also went toward projects that educate value-added producers and provide them with infrastructure help, like Vermont Food Venture Center, a shared-use kitchen incubator for value-added and specialty food producers in Hardwick, Vt. Another example is the Food Innovation Center, where experts in the field conduct studies related to product development, packaging, shelf life, consumer acceptance, economic feasibility, and product marketing.

Jim Slama of Chicago-based Family Farmed attended Friday’s conference and has worked with just such USDA grants to train producers to enter the wholesale market, run a food distribution hub, and bridge the food safety gap for small producers who have often shouldered unfortunate burdens when it comes to the wholesale environment with the On-Farm Food Safety Project. He sees some of these less sexy elements of the local food to be just as crucial as seasonal eating and farmers markets.

“The local food movement really took off with most folks selling direct through farmers markets and CSAs, and that’s great,” says Slama, “and yet 97 percent of the food consumed in America goes through the wholesale markets. So if we’re really going to create new markets for family farmers and cut food miles, we have to figure out how to get into these markets.”

Photos: Top, psrobin. Bottom, USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan at the Fifth Generation Farms Fresh Market–a grant recipient–in Lake City, Fla. by Ellen Boukari/USDA.

Originally published on Grist

Perhaps no one represented the American work ethic more than the dairy farmer. Early morning hours and hard physical labor, often conducted in solitude while ankle deep in muck. Families working together to get the job done. They have long proudly supplied a demand for their community, and like most farmers, are clearly not in it for the money.

Today however, the American dairy farmer also represents the frustration and economic hardship evident across our nation. Increasing volatility in the price of milk paid to farmers, higher feed costs, corporate consolidation in the supply chain, organic milk farms scaling up, and questionable government policies all have farmers shedding a few tears. The life is so unappealing that the number of American families remaining in milk farming has plummeted from roughly 165,000 20 years ago, to less than 50,000 today.

Behind the innocent glass of milk lies an intriguing story that’s not so black and white: Many farmers are losing money, organic milk is in short supply,  anti-trust lawsuits have been filed, and legislative reform is on the agenda. Farmers, processors, distributors, and retailers are engaged in conversations like never before. And cows. Don’t forget about the cows.

Please join us for the next Kitchen Table Talks in San Francisco on Tuesday, February 21 from 6:30 – 8:30 pm at 18 Reasons, as we discuss the current state of the organic dairy industry.

When: Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Time: Food and drink at 6:30. Discussion from 7 – 8:30 pm
Where: 18 Reasons (3674 18th St., San Francisco, 94110)
Tickets: $10 Brown Paper Tickets. NOTE: A limited number of sliding scale tickets will be available on a first come, first serve basis at 7 pm on the night of the event.

Joining us in conversation will be:

Leslie Butler, Department of Agricultural Economics at U.C. Davis. Leslie holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University. He regularly testifies at state and national hearings regarding dairy policy, and has published numerous articles on dairy production and economics marketing and policy.

Mike Griffin, West Region Pool Manager, Organic Valley. Mike was born and raised in Petaluma, CA. After his first year of college, he began his journey into farming, and never looked back. His vast  experience over 30 years at Clover Stornetta as a truck driver, distribution foreman, plant manager and in public relations, ultimately led him to Organic Valley in 2011, the nation’s largest cooperative of organic farmers.

Richard Hughes, owner Westfield Jersey’s in Bodega, CA. Richard was a self-proclaimed “city boy,” until he turned 15 and a 4-H project began his life long journey and commitment to dairy farming.  In 1976, Richard and his wife purchased a 182-acre ranch just outside of Bodega. They currently have around 100 Jersey cows, have completed the transition to organic farming, and provide milk to Straus Family Creamery.

Bob McGee, CFO/COO Straus Family Creamery, Marshall, CA.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of Civil Eats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. Seasonal snacks and refreshments generously provided by Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

Honestly, I don’t get it. What’s wrong with labeling? Most other developed countries–the 15 nations in the European Union, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Russia and China–all have some sort of GE labeling requirements. And public opinion polls here in the U.S. have clearly and consistently shown that nearly all of us–over 90 percent in recent polls–want labeling of GE products.

“If you want to avoid sugar, aspartame, trans-fats, MSG, or just about anything else, you read the label,” Mark Bittman notes. So why not GMO’s–genetically modified organisms–why aren’t they listed?

Because they don’t have to be. In the Spring of 2000, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that labeling of GE foods would remain voluntary. Perversely, it is companies with GMO-free products that want to add “NON-GE” labels which have faced the tight regulations (and litigation challenges from industry). The agency argues that guaranteeing a product to be free of GMO material is virtually impossible.

It was 1992 when FDA cooked up this idea that GE foods need not be labeled because they were not “materially” different from other foods.  While the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires the FDA to prevent consumer deception by clarifying that a food label is misleading if it omits significant, “material” information, the Agency chose to limit what it considered “material” to only changes in food that could be noted by taste, smell, or other senses.  Since GE foods can’t be “sensed” in this way, FDA declared them to be “substantially equivalent” to conventionally produced foods, and no labeling was required.

Wow. Has anyone told the FDA about nanotechnology? We have entered a brave new world of 21st century food science, yet we’re using seriously outdated definitions of “material differences” and “substantially equivalent.”

Here’s my thinking on this: If I just made a better salmon, I’d want people to know about it. I’d want them to know that by adding just one gene from a Pacific Salmon to an Atlantic Salmon, I can bring you this GE salmon faster and cheaper and without overfishing its wild cousins.

I might spare everyone the part about how all the fish are infertile females, even if that’s how wild populations are safeguarded. It just might be more than what a customer will want to read on a label, but it makes for an interesting backstory, no?

I’m not an advocate for the GE-salmon, nor am I a frankenfood-phobe. We’ve got to feed the world somehow, and well-regulated aquaculture systems are likely to be a big part of the solution.

What I am for is labeling, and not just labeling “bads,” but labeling “goods” as well. Case in point–the term “organic” on the label means this is a good product which was responsibly produced (without GMOs by the way).

Let’s take the stigma out of labels and have them do what they do best–inform consumer choice. And while we’re setting in place a 21st century approach to genetically engineered food products, let’s settle on some suitably modern-day definitions.

They may taste, smell and look the same, but there is most definitely a “material difference” between a salmon genetically altered to grow at a rate 6-10 times faster than its wild counterpart. Oh, and the former can’t reproduce. If that’s not material, then what is?

Originally published on Huffington Post

When I wrote recently about the next generation of genetically engineered seeds, I was in truth referring to the next next generation. The fact is that the next actual generation of seeds is already out of the lab and poised for approval by the USDA.

And I’m not talking about Monsanto’s recently approved “drought-tolerant” seeds, which the USDA itself has observed are no more drought-tolerant than existing conventional hybrids.

No, the “exciting” new seeds are simply resistant to more than one kind of pesticide. Rather than resisting Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup alone, they will now also be resistant to Dow AgroScience’s pesticide 2,4-D.

“A new pesticide,“ you say. “How exciting!” Except 2,4-D, despite its catchy name, has been around since World War II. Not only is it one of the most commonly used pesticides in the world, but it came to further prominence in certain circles when it was incorporated as a main ingredient in Agent Orange.

Indeed, as with research into new antibiotics, research into new—potentially safer—pesticides has come to a virtual standstill. Like the drug pipeline, the pesticide pipeline has run dry. Instead, biotech companies are going back to the older, more toxic chemicals, like 2,4-D, for inspiration.

And while you’d expect opposition to these new products from the likes of Tom Philpott of Mother Jones or Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, one place you might not expect to see it is the pages of the influential, peer-reviewed journal BioScience.

And yet there it is! Led by David Mortensen, a team of scientists from Penn State, Montana State, and the University of New Hampshire published a paper that describes the effects on agriculture from an over-reliance on glyphosate and an overuse of Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds. It also discusses at length the risks of using new seeds that “stack” resistance to various pesticides into one genetically engineered package.

In short, they say that you can’t believe Monsanto and Dow when they hype gyphosate resistance plus 2,4-D resistance as two great tastes that taste great together. The two companies are promising to eliminate the growing superweed menace—the one that has caused farmers to abandon thousands of acres of prime farmland and to return to older, more toxic pesticides to protect their crops.

What these scientists conclude is that with so many weeds resistant to glyphosate already, it won’t take long for them to develop resistance to 2,4-D as well.  According to the study’s authors, almost half of the nearly 40 species of weeds that are already resistant to two pesticides have arisen since 2005 (i.e. since the Roundup Ready era began). In short, the crisis Monsanto and Dow are promising to head off is already here.

There are other problems with 2,4-D, such as a strong link to cancer and a much greater tendency to drift on the wind (and thus contaminate nearby fields and waterways)—problems that the development of the less toxic, less volatile glyphosate was supposed to have “solved.” Yet now, thanks to Big Ag’s over-reliance on these genetically engineered one-hit wonders, which encouraged farmers to use too much glyphosate too often, we’re back to square one—or rather to square toxic.

There is, however, an alternative—and one that doesn’t require a total transition to organic agriculture (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Mortensen and his team describe in detail a practice called Integrated Weed Management (IWM). Like its sibling, Integrated Pest Management (IPM), IWM does involve the use of chemical pesticides. But it’s a judicious use that can act as a last resort rather than a first line of defense. As the paper states:

IWM integrates tactics, such as crop rotation, cover crops, competitive crop cultivars, the judicious use of tillage, and targeted herbicide application, to reduce weed populations and selection pressures that drive the evolution of resistant weeds.

It’s designed for production agriculture and would most likely increase farmer profits, since farmers would get the benefit of reduced seed and pesticide costs and no real loss of productivity. But, as with the climate-friendly agriculture I discussed the other day, you’re unlikely to see IWM embraced by Big Ag any time soon.

The USDA, along with the entire large-scale agriculture economy, is built around the profits of pesticide and biotech companies. You need only watch the USDA approve new genetically engineered products—which the agency admits represents a threat to other forms of agriculture—to see how deep in the tank to these companies our government is.

Tom Philpott observed that with this latest development, agriculture is at “a crossroads.” I disagree. I would say that if the USDA approves this new multiple pesticide-resistant GMO seed as it’s expected to, large-scale agriculture in the country will have reached a true dead end.

Photo: Minnemom

As a federally funded school food program evolved from its inception in the first half of the 20th century to become a permanent fixture in the educational landscape across the country, the NYC school food program became a leading influence in the country’s experiments, failures, and successes in school food service. School and city officials sorted through the wrong ingredients for school lunches and exposed the detrimental effects of decreased funding for school lunch programs. Eventually, engaging students in understanding the nutritious value of the food they consumed righted the relationship between children and their food and connected students to the source of their meals through school gardens and food education programming.

The National School Lunch Act was enacted in 1946 with the “basic purpose…to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation’s children by encourage them to eat more nutritious foods.” Yet by 1972, the New York Times deemed Americans “nutritional illiterates” and the cost of malnutrition had an estimated $30 billion annual price tag. Lack of nutritional awareness paired with the problems caused by the country’s dire economic situation. At this time doctors in NYC suggested nutrition education in schools as a method for improving health and nutritional awareness. However, more fundamental concerns for school security, the basic lack of food for residents across the City, and a lack of funding for such nutritional education programs meant that these suggestions were not made manifest.

In 1977, just two months after the report from the federal General Accounting Office revealed poor nutritional quality in large urban school districts across the country, NYC’s schools adopted the Energy Factor program. Rather than integrate nutritional education programs or involve students in the processes of bringing the food from the field to the lunch table, schools responded to the flash and glamour of the fast food industry that captured the attention of the whole country. Since hamburgers, hot dogs, and fried chicken were attractive to student consumers, they were served as options in the Energy Factor and considered healthy alternatives to “junk food, Twinkies, cupcakes, and the like.” Yet at the same time the NYC School Board implemented fast-food lunches in the three pilot schools, it also contemplated introducing salad bars into school food options. Two seemingly opposite food futures faced NYC students. They could choose hamburgers, which had risen to the status of a nutritionally superior lunch item – at least in comparison to what had been served on lunch trays or brought in brown paper bags from students’ homes previously. Or, on the other hand, there was a glimmer of an idea to provide them with fresh greens on a salad bar. Given heavy marketing efforts for the Energy Factor and continued lack of infrastructure to support healthy food education and school gardening, the future of salads as the preferred lunch choice was bleak.

While the Energy Factor was adopted with the support of school officials and promoted by the head school food administrator, Elizabeth Cagan, by 1980 the “nutritional message” of the program had become questionable. Cagan realized that student retention and and increased participation in the lunch program was not a sufficient goal if it meant a compromise on the healthfulness of the food . Cagan fought hard for the removal of all frozen food pack lunches (the equivalent of a TV dinner) and reduced the number of schools serving such meals from 400 to 100. Nutritional experts like Ann Cook, who promoted school lunch as “where the good food is now,” tried to combat the poverty and junk food stigmas formerly associated with the school lunch program.

In the early years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, rearranging the priorities and tactics of serving school meals in New York City came to a head. By 2010 a collaboration of the Mayor’s Fund, GrowNYC and other government agencies established the Citywide School Gardens Initiative, promoting garden and food education through funding, garden maintenance assistance, and coordinated educational tools and programs like the Garden-to-Café harvest events. A grant from the Fund for Public Health in New York City propelled the healthy food options in schools to include a salad bar at each lunchtime period, finally bringing the efforts of school food reformers in the 1980s to fruition.

The purpose of the Garden-to-Café program, which is administrated the New York City Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood, is to help children connect the origin of their food with its related nutritional quality and fresh taste. During the 2011 spring harvest season, the program facilitated events at 19 schools throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Throughout the 2010-2011 school year, the program partnered with 55 NYC public, charter, elementary, middle and high schools, in effect exposing more than 35,000 students throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn to the efforts of the Garden-to-Café program.

The School Gardens Initiative and the Garden-to-Café program are the result of NYC’s commitment to bringing healthy food and nutritional education opportunities to its students. Wrestling with the disconnects between students and their food source; a lack of government funding and a need to feed schoolchildren; and fast food culture and a focus on health, the NYC school food program has ultimately provided substantial opportunities for healthy and local food education and continues to improve the quality of its meals for all students.

The best part of the new school lunch regulations is that for the first time, there is a maximum limit set on calories; previously there was only a minimum number of calories required, with no maximum. As a result, many schools in the past served foods high in sugar, such as canned fruit packed in heavy syrup rather than its own juice, or extra packages of crackers kids didn’t need, just to reach the required minimum number of calories. Now the old minimum has become the new maximum, so there is no longer any need for calorie inflation in school lunches. Other positive changes are requirements for larger servings and more varied kinds of vegetables, including dark orange and leafy greens, more fruit and whole grains.

On the downside, the six cents per lunch additional funding being offered is not enough to offset the increased cost, which has been estimated by the USDA as about 11 cents per meal. To compensate, there are regulations requiring schools to raise the price of paid lunches if they fall below the government reimbursement for a free lunch, as well as new regulations designed to drive more revenue from food sold a la carte in competition with the National School Lunch Program. There are also some changes to the way students are qualified for free meals, which could increase the number of kids eating school lunch.

For some districts, these changes will drive extra revenue, but for school districts like San Francisco, where the paid lunch price is already higher than the free lunch reimbursement, where most a la carte has already been eliminated in an attempt to dispel the stigma of eating school meals, and where most of the new methods for identifying students as qualified for free lunch are already in use, there is little additional revenue projected. Trying to charge students who pay for their lunch a substantially higher price than what the government pays for a free lunch is not going to balance the budget. Our schools will just have to absorb the shortfall, as they always have, driving the deficit for our Student Nutrition department even higher.

That nutrition department deficit, which in 2010-11 topped $3 million, has for years been covered by money from the school district’s general fund, leaving less money for teachers, textbooks, and other classroom needs. While meals served in SFUSD cafeterias already meet or exceed most of the new nutrition regulations, the higher cost of serving this more nutritious food has helped drive the deficit, along with the higher cost of labor in this high cost of living city. In the past, the Board of Education and district administration generously agreed to fund the higher cost, but it was their choice to do so, and there was always the possibility that the whole grains, fresh fruit, and salad bars might have to be scaled back to save money, as happened midway through the 2009-10 school year. Now, when the new regulations go into effect next school year, those improvements will be requirements, not forward-thinking extras subject to the budget knife. In other words, not only will the Student Nutrition deficit continue, or even grow, as a result of the new regulations, but the school district administration will have fewer options for fighting that deficit; most reductions in the quality of the food will be off-limits.

That’s the conundrum. We want healthy food served at school–including the larger servings of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains mandated by the new regulations–but should we have to pay for them with our children’s classroom funds? With school funding in California plummeting even under the best case state budget scenario, it’s hard to feel good about cementing healthy food upgrades at the expense of other educational priorities.

We are at a crossroads in this country–we must decide whether it is worth it to spend a little more money now to adequately fund school nutrition programs, so that children can learn to make healthy eating habits a way of life, or whether we want to kick that can down the road, scrimp on school meal funding now, but instead pay the much higher cost of healthcare and loss of productivity when those children grow up to be unhealthy adults dealing with type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and other weight-related disorders. It is an enormous disappointment that our Congress has chosen the “kick the can” solution.

When Jesse Kuhn started Marin Roots Farm at age 28, he already had dirt under his fingernails. He’d studied ag in college, managed a student farm, and worked as a landscaper. But when it came to succeeding financially in the farming business, he had a long way to go. “I was charging up my credit cards like crazy and bouncing balances back and forth,” he says. “I almost had to declare bankruptcy during the first year.”

Almost 10 years and many lessons later, Marin Roots is a well-established organic specialty produce business. “It’s a lot of people’s dream to live off the land, but the reality of it is, you have to have a plan for how you’re going to pay the bills,” says Kuhn.

His journey is not unlike that of many beginners who are eager to try their hand at farming but don’t yet have all the necessary skills and resources. In a recent report titled Building a Future with Farmers, the National Young Farmers’ Coalition (NYFC) surveyed 1,000 young and beginning farmers across the US and found that access to land, capital, health care, credit, and business training posed huge challenges.

“What’s different for young and first-career farmers is that they don’t have a lot of equity,” says Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a young farmer in New York’s Hudson Valley who is also co-chair of NYFC and director of The Greenhorns, a film and nonprofit organization that advocates for young farmers. “You see a lot of student debt. Farming is a high-capital industry—an industry that really needs us, but we’re walking in without any cash.” 

Green Thumbs To Greenhorn

Kuhn’s path to farming started as a child in San Geronimo, where he had little exposure to agriculture but picked up a passion for gardening from his grandmother. “She had two green thumbs for sure, and I learned from that,” says Kuhn. When he went to Humboldt State, he joined their new agriculture program and studied permaculture on the side. He also took time off from school to work at an organic soil company and contemplate career paths.

After college he started farming a small one-acre plot, using the model he’d learned on the student farm, but realized the operation was more like a hobby farm than a viable business. So he worked as a landscaper while farming small plots in friends’ backyards, which eventually helped him build the courage to take the leap into full-time farming.

He took out a “land wanted” ad in the Press Democrat and, after receiving a number of responses, settled on a 15-acre agricultural plot on a goat dairy ranch near Petaluma. But there were setbacks infrastructure-wise, such as having to install a new irrigation system, and Kuhn began charging up his credit cards. Right when he was about to declare bankruptcy, a low-interest beginning farmer loan through the USDA Farm Service Agency came through. He was able to buy a tractor, a delivery truck, and seeds.

Through much experimentation, Kuhn found his niche growing organic specialty crops such as baby greens, roots, beans, and summer squash for farmers markets and grocery stores, restaurants, and wholesalers. “A lot of the products I was selling weren’t standardized because I was doing open-pollinated varieties, but there was certainly a market for that,” he says. He now employs a handful of full-time market and field staff.

Kuhn has had to learn much through trial by fire, particularly the organizational side of growing a successful business. He’s found support in his family (his mother helps with accounting, and his father is on call as farm mechanic), as well as in other Marin farmers and the Bay Area farmers market community. “It’s definitely tough farming,” he says. “The farmers market has been a great support network for me, meeting up with the other farmers every week, bouncing ideas off each other, seeing what they’re bringing to market, and getting their advice.”

Growing Roots

Kuhn is still a young farmer by national standards, which place the average farmer at 57. The USDA estimates that 500,000 US farmers (about one-quarter) will retire by 2030, leaving a large gap for the next generation to fill. “We have ever older farmers and ever fewer people who are growing our food,” says Fleming. “I think young farmers are especially well poised to address food security and the re-regionalization of our food system.”

As a result of the Building a Future with Farmers study, the NYFC has proposed a policy agenda including recommendations such as improving credit and savings opportunities, addressing land access and affordability issues, legalizing farm apprenticeships, and expanding training programs. (For more about legal issues related to apprenticeships, see The Farm Intern Conundrum.)

The NYFC study underscores the viability of direct marketing as a start-up strategy for new farmers, with 61 percent of their respondents selling at farmers markets and 49 percent through CSAs. “Helping young farmers means reorienting our food systems so that we’re not just supporting producers who are growing commodity crops and abandoning the small- and medium-scale producers who are more than likely selling directly to the marketplace,” says Fleming.

For aspiring greenhorns, Kuhn recommends getting a job or volunteering on a farm in order to get to know the business. When taking the plunge into starting your own farm, he emphasizes finding the right piece of land, with infrastructure already in place, and developing a niche.

But despite the challenges he’s encountered along the way, Kuhn loves what he does. “Being able to wake up on the farm is incredible,” he says. “And it’s rewarding to go to the farmers market and meet the people who are going to be eating my food.”

Photo: Gary Yost. Chart by the National Young Farmers Coalition.

Originally published on CUESA