The countryside is the place to go if you want to live a healthy life with clean air and water, lots of exercise, and fresh foods, right?

Wrong.  Maybe dead wrong.

That pastoral dream is a fantasy according to a report on the relative health of counties throughout the United States released last week by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

The study found that, across the country, suburban and urban counties tend to be healthier than rural counties. In fact, 84 percent of the unhealthiest counties across the country are rural.

This matters to me because I live in Illinois where the majority of our 103 counties are rural, including my own.  The map of the study’s “health outcomes” printed in USA Today showed the five healthiest counties in each state in green, and the five unhealthiest counties in red.  My eye immediately went to the lone green spot in the middle of Illinois.  That green spot had a familiar outline.  It is where I live: Woodford County.

On “health outcomes,” the study ranks Woodford the third best of Illinois’s 101 counties, right behind the relatively affluent Chicago “collar counties” of Kendall and DuPage. Indeed, our death and disease rates are impressively lower than neighboring rural counties.

What makes Woodford County a veritable oasis of health in a sea of less healthy rural counties?

There are many threads you can pull from the data that contributed to the study’s rankings, including statistics about health behaviors (alcohol and tobacco use, obesity rates), social and economic factors (education, employment, income, community safety), health care access and quality, and environmental factors, including air quality and access to healthy foods.

From all these metrics, a few special characteristics of Woodford County stood out.  First, our county seat (Eureka, pop. 5,000) has its own hospital, which undoubtedly helps our high ranking in access to health care. But our ranking was also boosted by our access to healthy foods.

The study measured “access to healthy foods” as the percent of zip codes in a county with a healthy food outlet, which was defined as a grocery store or produce stand/farmers’ market.  Woodford County doesn’t have as many grocery stores as we did when I was growing up here, but we still have a lot compared to the barren “food deserts” of many rural counties.  Plus we have produce stands and farmers markets, as well as local CSAs and many other informal ways to get healthy local foods from our neighbors—many of whom are organic farmers.

This is something the study didn’t measure, but which may be an important predictor of health:  freedom from exposure to agricultural chemicals, and a cluster of farmers raising healthy foods for local consumption.

Unlike most of the Midwest, the landscape of Woodford County does not consist of thousands of flat acres carpeted in chemical-intensive corn and soybeans.  Rather, because the last glacier of the ice age deposited mounds of granulated rock and sand here, we have wooded hills, steep ravines, and rolling pastures–many too steep and rolling for the giant machinery of chemical-industrial agriculture.

For these reasons, our farms have remained relatively small (averaging only 337 acres) and many of them are organic–some for more than a generation.  Within a 10-mile radius of where I live, there are at least 10 organic farmers.  Instead of raising subsidized commodity crops destined for feedlots, processed foods, ethanol plants, or export, these farmers grow fruits and vegetables, meats and eggs, and other healthy foods for their families and their communities.  Many of my urban friends have no idea how rare this is–to actually find real food in farm country.

Not only does this local food production lead to easy access and greater consumption of healthy food, it also contributes to the health of people living in Woodford County in other ways, including relatively clean air to breathe and water to drink.  While the only environmental factor this study measured was air particulates, many other studies link exposure to agricultural chemicals to more miscarriages, childhood cancers, Parkinson’s and other diseases.  Woodford County has thousands of organic acres whose air, soil, water, animals and people are not exposed to agricultural chemicals.

When you add up our county’s lower chemical exposures, our organic farmers doing physical labor, the jobs created when organic farmers hire workers instead of using chemicals, and farmers and workers who make a decent living by direct-marketing their products you get communities that are physically and economically healthy.  These are just a few of the reasons that my little county ranked third out of all 103 counties in Illinois.

While this is good news for me and the nearly 40,000 other residents of Woodford County, we need to work for the same level of good health everywhere.  In addition to improving access to affordable, quality health care, we need to increase the production and consumption of healthy foods in every community.  One way to do this is to push our legislators for changes in federal farm policy that in effect subsidizes junk food.

Another way is for each of us to buy sustainably-raised foods from our local farmers. By supporting local, sustainable agriculture, we not only get delicious food and better personal health, we create jobs, improve our communities’ economic health, and facilitate a cleaner environment.

So bite into a lovely local apple today, and watch the healthy ripples expand.

The Ecologist reported recently that three French farmers have successfully sued chemical companies for cancer and Parkinson’s disease that resulted from their occupational use of pesticides–an issue as widespread as it is under-reported. A cereal farmer with 100,000 hectares of land in in the Vosges region, Dominque Marchal was the first farmer to have his leukemia associated with his daily pesticide use. His wife was determined to get to the bottom of the issue. From the Ecologist:

She employed a lawyer to help her gather the scientific evidence and herself set about gathering invoices and receipts to list which pesticides her husband had been using in previous years. Then, from their own pesticide stocks and with the help of neighbouring farms, she was able to gather samples of each of the potential cancer-causing substances. Her lawyer helped her find a laboratory willing to analyse the contents, and when the results came back they showed that 40 per cent contained benzene, a substance not marked on any of the contents labels but that is known to increase the risk of leukaemia.

No farmer has succeeded in taking on Big Chem for their illnesses in the U.S. because it is especially difficult to get medical recognition for the disease-occupation correlation, despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence that exposure to certain pesticides increases the risk of illness. (See Washington University in St. Louis’ epidemiological study that shows high rates of Parkinson’s disease in the Midwest and Northeast, where agriculture and metal processing–two occupations that use chemicals associated with Parkinson’s–are most prevalent. And the long term Agricultural Health Study focused on Iowa and North Carolina, which began in 1994, has found elevated risk for farmers of multiple myeloma and cancers of the lip, gallbladder, ovary, prostate, and thyroid.)

However, many farmers and rural Americans are taking note of the increasing rate at which their family members and neighbors are diagnosed with cancer and other diseases. Sandra Zellmer, who lost her mother, father and uncle, all farmers, to cancer between 2004-2008, wrote recently about the link between the herbicide atrazine and the pesticide DDT to the types of cancers that killed her family. Her findings echo the blockbuster piece on atrazine in the New York Times last summer, which brought attention to the issues posed by heightened exposure to and weak regulation of the weed killer, noting that “Laboratory experiments suggest that when animals are exposed to brief doses of atrazine before birth, they may become more vulnerable to cancer later.”

The EPA is currently re-assessing atrazine, which has been found in the drinking water of 33 million Americans. A recent report by the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) and the Land Stewardship Project entitled The Syngenta Corporation and Atrazine The Cost to the Land, People and Democracy [pdf] includes the stories of five farmers who’ve decided to stop using atrazine for health and safety reasons, and also draws attention to the possibility of a link between atrazine and breast cancer. From the report:

Atrazine increases the activity of an enzyme called aromatase that can, in turn, increase levels of estrogen. According to Dr. [Janet] Gray [Board Member and Acting Science Adviser to the Breast Cancer Fund], “This is of great concern when it comes to breast cancer because we know that increased exposures to estrogens are one of the major risk factors for increased incidences of breast cancer.”

Here is Zellmer’s response to these disturbing facts:

No wonder farming is considered one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States. Who knew that farmers’ families, their neighbors, and their neighbors’ neighbors were at risk, too. If we miss this opportunity to delve deeply into the potential link between a widely used chemical and the health of our food producers and their communities, anger—not acceptance—is the appropriate response.

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, PhD, Senior Scientist at the PANNA said that the problem with making these connections is related to the structural failure of our regulatory system:

Farmers, farmworkers and their families have been on the frontlines of pesticide exposure for decades. Parkinson’s, asthma, birth defects and childhood cancers are just a few of the diseases farming communities suffer in disproportionate amounts. Each year new studies come out further substantiating the links between exposure and disease. In the U.S. though, these studies have not amounted to policy change because — unlike in much of Europe — our legal frameworks for regulating toxic chemicals and pesticides is effectively designed to protect chemical companies over public health. So people continue to get sick and die, while pesticide companies get rich and our public agencies look the other way.

At present, the U.S. system is set up to allow two means of addressing environmental and public health harms: litigation and regulation, and both require levels of proof inadequate to the task of protecting public health. For instance, FIFRA [the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act] & TOSCA [the Toxic Substances Control Act] are the two legal frameworks governing pesticides and toxic chemicals — both treat chemicals as innocent until proven guilty (it takes decades to ‘prove’ a chemical guilty). The head of the EPA states flatly that TOSCA is toothless from a regulatory standpoint, and FIFRA makes it nearly impossible to take legal action against a pesticide company or applicator.

What we need is a comprehensive re-orientation of the U.S. government’s approach to public health. We can follow Europe’s lead here by adopting the “precautionary principle” as a guide.

Many farmers are changing their practices, sparing themselves from routine chemical exposure and thus risk. Mary Howell Martens and her husband Klaas Martens run a 1300 acre organic farm in upstate New York, where they grow corn, beans and grains. Here is what she had to say in an article she wrote about her farm’s transition away from chemical agriculture:

…after a long and successful day of spraying, Klaas would invariably come in the house with clothes reeking of pesticide despite the Tyvek suit, his head aching and a queasy stomach. We wanted to believe that it was due to ‘just a germ’ since he had been working such long hours, but we knew better. My husband was slowly being poisoned.

How do two people so apparently committed to the agribusiness ideal of American farming end up operating over 1300 acres organically just 10 years later? We truly believe that we were like many conventional farmers, using the chemical fertilizers and pesticides simply because we saw no other alternatives, but hating what it might be doing to us, our family, our land, and our environment. We farmed conventionally because we had been told so often that it was the only way to survive in agriculture today.

One evening later that year, we read a small classified advertisement in a regional farm paper looking for organic wheat. Immediately Klaas was on the telephone and we were excited – was there really a market for organic field crops? We quickly decided that we would leap at this new challenge. If there was a way to grow our crops organically, we were going to figure it out!

In her article, which is geared towards helping other farmers, Martens goes on to describe the changes they had to make in farm management, and how they learned to adapt to new soil fertility and weed control practices.

In order to decrease the risks from routine pesticide exposure in farming, it is going to take both rebuilding rural communities, so that farmers will have new markets and support, along with recognition from policy makers that chemical agriculture has some serious fallout: aside from destroying the productivity of the soil, damaging the environment, and supporting the production of unhealthy food, it is costing human lives.

While many of the more than 2,200 attendees of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture’s yearly gathering would have gladly entertained a dialogue with a Monsanto representative, it’s safe to say they view the conference’s central concept in a quite different light.

In his opening remarks, PASA President Kim Seeley borrowed a phrase from architect and designer William McDonough, a previous year’s keynote speaker, and asked: “Does the end result love all the children? We will condone all forms of farming that will love the children.”

It’s hard to associate the maker and marketer of Roundup pesticide and poison-withstanding genetically modified seeds with “loving all the children.” Yet, that is what Monsanto–newly crowned by Forbes “for persevering in the face of vicious criticism to feed the world”–would have us believe through what writer Ken Edelstein has called a “greenwash marketing” campaign that is “positively Rovian on the chutzpah meter.” Equally credibility-straining is Elanco, Ely Lilly and Company’s animal-health division, which in 2008 purchased the Posilac brand of synthetic bovine-growth hormone from Monsanto. Elanco’s president has been on a speaking tour promoting a technology-dependent program of “Sustainability and Feeding the World.”

Obviously, a different take on technology from that of most who attended the conference.

And in a recent call-to-arms speech delivered in Seattle, American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman railed against those he called “extremists who want to drag agriculture back to the days of 40 acres and a mule” and against “misguided, activist-driven regulation on labor and environment being proposed in Washington.” Further, Stallman called sustainability “the most overused and ill-defined word in the policy arena today.”

Finally, a patch, however small, of common ground.

“I completely agree that the term ‘sustainability’ is overused and often confused for something it’s not by those who try to use it,” PASA Executive Director Brian Snyder said in his stage-setting conference speech. “So, I have an idea–how about if you, Mr. Stallman, and your counterparts at Monsanto and Elanco stop using it! We can handle this one, and have been doing so quite ably for several decades now.”

Snyder said it is impossible to overlook the deliberate attempt by sustainable agriculture’s detractors to dilute the dream and goals PASA and its members aspire to in order that their objective of putting profitability above all else does not fail.

Not that profitability was ignored during the Farming for the Future conference. Quite the contrary. Neither was the concept of “small” farming, currently a pejorative term in Washington and elsewhere, where those who use that word, according to Snyder, “get immediately pigeonholed and tossed aside as a probable relic of the past.”

Here, the common-ground borderline was crossed.

“There is nothing ‘small’ about what any member of PASA is doing with respect to our food system, whether as a producer, processor or consumer, regardless of any volume specifications,” Snyder said.

“People like to hear about lots of acres or large numbers of animals and bushels of corn per acre measured in the hundreds,” he continued. “But models of farming that can gross $50,000 to $100,000 on a single acre, or Community Supported Agriculture programs that, in some cases and on relatively small acreage, are able to count their customers in the thousands and bank $1 million or more in the spring before even planting a seed, are anything but small!”

A non-genetically-modified seed, he might have added.

Snyder said that a second misconception held as incontrovertible truth in the halls of power is the notion that “we cannot feed the world this way,” that only industrial food systems can do so.

“We must encourage everyone, wherever they are and as a priority, to eat food produced as near to their own homes as possible,” Snyder said. “Secondly, feed thy neighbor as thyself. From this perspective, local food not only can feed the world, it may be the only way to ever feed the world in a healthy and just manner.”

Few involved with farming, even of the sustainable variety, relish increased government regulation. But Snyder likened what he called the “Stallman Doctrine”–a “Don’t Cap Our Future”-sloganed, war-like resistance to a cap-and-trade system or any proposal to limit farming’s environmental impact–to a modern re-emergence of Manifest Destiny, “wherein we take and use what we believe was divinely ordained for us to have, regardless of the consequences for others.”

By contrast, Snyder said a truly sustainable farmer wakes every morning with two thoughts in mind. The first is one of gratitude that the land we are privileged to own, rent or be paid to cultivate has been given to us, and we must give it back in better shape than we found it.

“Second,” Snyder said, “we as individual farmers are limited and essentially dependent on each other to figure out what’s best to do with this land in order to honor it, improve it and make a living from it and one day to deliver it back to the source from whence it came.”

“It’s all about maintaining a ‘right relationship’ with the land, which,” he said, “is analogous to the good relationships we hope for in other aspects of our lives as well.”

Or, at the end of the day, does it truly love all the children, and will it give them a good Earth to love, as well?

That–regardless of what corporate farmers and the companies they serve will tell you–is what sustainable agriculture is really all about.

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In contrast to the Stallman Doctrine – an unwillingness to work as hard as possible to save our beautiful planet – PASA Executive Director Brian Snyder offered the Promise of Sustainability.

“We understand that this world is not really ours to do with as we please and that we must work together to make it better,” Snyder said. From this perspective, here are some things sustainable farmers choose for themselves, rather than depend on government regulations or ballot initiatives to force upon them:

• We would do everything possible to protect the Earth, its water, air and climate systems, and to cherish and protect our great watersheds, including especially here in the Mid-Atlantic region, that which feeds the Chesapeake Bay.

• We would never lock up livestock of any kind for prolonged periods in restrictive cages or crates where they can’t even turn around or care for their young in a natural manner.

• We would not treat cows with artificial growth hormones, either for profit or the pride to be gained from seeing how much milk we can force them to give. We would also never feed antibiotics to animals for the sake of speeding their growth, especially in the absence of medical need.

• We would take whatever pre-emptive steps may be necessary – even if less than 100 percent certain – to protect our bees and other pollinators, and also to promote the diversity and integrity of seeds we depend on to produce food, avoiding advanced technological strategies that might otherwise undermine or diminish them.

• In dealing with our neighbors around the world, we would reject the political philosophy of Free Trade in favor of Fair Trade.

• We would treat with dignity immigrant and migrant laborers who are needed to work our fields, care for our animals and generally keep our food system moving, and welcome them as full members of our communities as they choose and are able to settle here.

• We would teach and assist the citizens, communities and countries of a hungry world to feed themselves as we would wish to be fed.

• We would build our entire food system on the concept that fair prices for farmers will keep wholesome, nutritious and safe food on our tables without fail.

Corporate entities such as Monsanto and Elanco–Ely Lilly Company’s animal-health division, which owns the Posilac brand of synthetic bovine growth hormone–lay claim to “sustainability,” thereby distorting its meaning and diluting its promise.

The president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, no ally of sustainable agriculture, recently called “sustainability” the most overused and ill-defined word in the policy arena.

Perhaps we can help.

The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture has recently partnered with Food Alliance, based in Portland, Oregon, to deliver a trusted, third-party certification to our region’s farms, processors, food buyers and consumers. The Food Alliance Certified seal ensures safe and fair working conditions, humane treatment of animals and careful stewardship of ecosystems. Here is how Food Alliance answers the question, “What is sustainable agriculture?”

Sustainable agriculture:

• Provides safe and fair working conditions. It creates a work environment with open communication about workplace safety and job satisfaction, with incentives and opportunities for development of employee skills; it considers quality-of-life issues for farm workers and their communities.

• Ensures the health and humane treatment of animals. It raises livestock with respect for their physical needs and comforts; it provides livestock with access to sunlight, fresh air and an environment where they can socialize and express normal behaviors; it handles livestock with care to minimize fear and stress.

• Does not use hormone or antibiotic supplements. It raises animals without using hormones or antibiotics to stimulate growth or productivity; it uses antibiotics only to treat a sick animal and return it to health, not as a substitute for healthy living conditions.

• Does not raise genetically modified crops or livestock. It raises crops or livestock that are not derived from transgenic or genetically modified organisms in order to respect public concern over potential impacts on human or environmental health.

• Reduces pesticide use and toxicity. It practices integrated pest management by using field scouting and cultural and biological controls to avoid pest problems; it minimizes risks to human health and the environment by selecting least toxic pest treatments and using best practices for application.

• Protects water resources. It protects water quality and riparian habitat by providing buffer zones along streams; it manages tillage to maximize the ability of soils to absorb rainfall; it manages animal wastes to prevent ground and surface water contamination.

• Protects and enhances soil resources. It protect soils by maximizing plant cover, rotating crops and using cover crops to enrich soil and increase productivity; it uses management-intensive grazing; it uses tillage methods that protect soil quality and promote soil conservation.

• Provides wildlife habitat. It encourages vegetative cover, food and water resources necessary for habitat; it establishes biological corridors; it manages mowing and grazing cycles to minimize impact on wildlife; it protects and restores wetland, prairie and woodland habitats.

• Continually improves practices. It sets annual goals for improving performance in areas addressed under Food Alliance certification; it evaluates and reports progress on goals annually.

For more information, go to www.foodalliance.org.

Causing no end of difficulties in our national discourse is the steadfast belief held by both the right and the left that everything is either right or left: bad or good, strong or weak, despotic or patriotic.  You’re either with us or you’re against us.  President Obama addressed this very effectively before both House Republicans and Senate Democrats in recent days.  It is media driven to a large extent because the media need controversy to sell papers, or bytes or views or whatever it is they’re selling these days.

The most common form this takes is the old build’em-up-then-tear’em-down routine.  Perhaps the only thing many Americans enjoy more than the uplifting emotion of a success story is the schadenfreude of watching that success come tumbling down.  So when an idea comes to the fore, the critics ooze from the woodwork and their primary tactic is divide and conquer.  Label it, frame the debate, and the fight is won or lost before the story is even told.

For a long time in the circles I travel in this was not a problem because the ideas embodied in what some have come to call SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, & Ethical) were not perceived as a threat to the established paradigm.  Recent successes such as Michael Pollan’s work have, however, shined a very bright spotlight on advocates of real food.  As a result, people who have been toiling at these ideas for decades are becoming targets of powerful interests in the Big Food lobby.  Such is the case this week at WeeklyStandard.com, where Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has found his most recent audience.

Mr. Hurst was among the earliest vocal detractors of Mr. Pollan’s work, as well as that of anyone who might find flaw in agroindustrial model.  His essay last summer, titled The Omnivore’s Delusion, did an excellent job of exploiting Pollan’s success to rally the big corporate agriculture interests against the perceived threat of critics both in the media and in the field.  It’s natural: he felt attacked and he responded, and has now done so again.  Unfortunately Mr. Hurst’s vitriol, then as now, only serves to fan the flames of a fire that needn’t be burning.  Individuals on neither side of the debate are inherently evil, in fact both want the same thing: healthy food for all.  Since our ideas for how to accomplish this differ, we are immediately cast into the right and left corners and told to come out fighting when the bell rings.

Of course this is not a new phenomenon.  City and country folk have mistrusted each other since the beginnings of civilization (which, it bears pointing out, came into being because of agriculture).  Nonetheless our society has changed enormously in the last 100 years.  Where once nearly everyone lived on a farm or had an immediate relative who did, today only 2% of the population lives in rural America.  It’s not a surprise that when the 2% senses criticism emanating from within the other 98% they’re going to feel a bit nervous.  Some of the critiques in fact even come from within the 2% (witness cattleman Will Harris in Georgia).  In his most recent essay though Mr. Hurst’s fears are misplaced, and he remains little more than a tool for moneyed interests.

The essay suffers from many errors of presumption as well as fact.  He contends that Kathleen Merrigan’s Know your Farmer initiative results from the idea that “America, it seems, has been operating at a knowledge deficit when it comes to farmers, and farmers lack the social skills to close the gap between eaters and producers of food.”  He is partially correct in that people in this country and throughout the Western world have become increasingly distanced from their sources of food, and we have become so to our detriment.  The second part of his statement though, a backhanded swipe at critics of industrial agriculture disguised as self-deprecation and designed to raise the ire of his fellow Farm Bureau members, is uninformed to say the least.  Not only are the farmers I know perfectly capable in the “social skills” department, both they and the rest of my friends in the movement to improve our food are working hard to close that gap.  Ms. Merrigan’s program is one of many tools.

While he correctly points out that the average age of farmers in America is 58, he misses the point that this means we are running out of farmers.  We actually now have more prisoners in America than farmers.  He goes on to put words in foodies’ mouths by claiming that we seem to think farmers are not sustainable.  Quite far from it, but many of the inputs many farmers use are not. These include the GMOs and chemical fertilizers that Farm Bureau and the Property and Environment Research Center he cites both adamantly advocate.  It’s not the farmers or even the farms that are unsustainable; it is the methods they have been railroaded into using by large corporate interests seeking markets for their chemicals since even before the early 70’s when Earl Butz and his “Get Big or Get Out” mantra took hold of American food.

The point is missed yet again when Mr. Hurst says:

In December, strawberries from California can be shipped to market in Canada with less total energy use than the locally grown crop. The food miles are greater, but the carbon footprint is smaller. True believers in the local food movement, of course, simply stop eating strawberries in winter. Their devotion is admirable, but a winter diet of freshly dug turnips and stored potatoes is hardly interesting.

I choose not to eat strawberries in the winter not because they come from far away but because they taste awful.  In my own restaurant, we stock everything feasible from local sources.  This does not mean, as Mr. Hurst would have it, that we have nothing but turnips and potatoes in winter, nor does it mean we forego oranges or olives because they don’t grow in Iowa.  Despite what he and his corporate-activist-supported friends at PERC might have you believe, the “SOLE” food movement is not a bunch of lefty Luddites, and that’s my main point (besides that I like turnips).  Not only does food I trust from people I know taste better for those reasons, it also keeps my dollars in my community.

Consider this: there are about 50,000 households in Johnson County Iowa, where I live.  If each of those households redirected just $10 of their existing weekly food budget toward buying something local, whether from the farmers market or a CSA or eggs from the farmer down the road, it would keep $26M in the local economy rather than it being siphoned off to China via Bentonville.  Now imagine the same thing in larger communities.  That’s not a left or right issue, that’s a hometown issue.

I must also point out Mr. Hurst’s use of the phrase “alleged global warming.”  It carries with it all the intellectual honesty of “alleged cancer from smoking.”

Agendas like those of Mr. Hurst, the Farm Bureau and PERC serve only the interests of the large corporations that fund them, not of the farmers whose toil fills their coffers.  Better to look to the like of the Practical Farmers of Iowa, who are truly concerned with the well-being of the food, the farms and the people on them.

This is not about rich v. poor, city v. country or smart v. dumb.  It’s not even I’m right and he’s wrong nor the reverse.  It’s that these issues are only important to those of us who eat, live and breathe on this planet.  It matters to those of us who have to pay for health care, and raise our children, and get and keep a job.  And the positions that the organization I work for, and many others take are not ones designed to attack farmers but rather to support them and all the people who are making food where it should be made: on farms and dairies, in breweries and wineries and vineyards and not in factories.

It was a blessing in disguise, one of many construction zone disasters that actually resulted in triumph.  One recent morning I walked into the only room that remains somewhat set up for day-to-day activities during our total DIY home remodel, sectioned off by hanging canvas tarps, gutted walls, electrical wires, naked bulbs and lots of dust, and on the floor lay splinters of wood and scattered index cards.  It looked like a crime scene from the movies, someone looking for my secret papers, but instead was my old, neglected recipe box that had tumbled off its absent-mindedly placed location on the highest shelf.

What was it doing way up there, and why would someone who centers her life on food in every way put it in such a hard to reach location?  Well, despite my enormous love of food, eating, and cooking, I have to admit to rarely using recipes.  My large collection of cookbooks, currently all packed away tightly in various sheds, are just that, a collection, more observed and admired from afar on the shelf than actually busted into and utilized.   I’ve even tried to make deals with myself, like starting a new habit of using Sunday night as recipe night and exploring the wealth of information that lies dormant on the shelf, but to no avail.  The recipe following habit just won’t stick.  My cooking style, and sometimes even baking style, is loose, whimsical, intuitive, vacillating with what is around, what I’ve learned and what my mood is more than by direction.  So the answer to why my recipe box sat in such an inaccessible spot is simply because I never look in it.  In fact, I almost forgot I had it.

But that fateful morning, as I gathered up the mess on the floor like a dropped deck of cards, I realized that it was about time to reorganize.  Over the course of the next few days I sorted through my recipes section by section, an assortment of neatly copied cards, Xeroxed magazine pages, printed online articles and of course, the requisite bits and pieces of ripped out newspaper clippings yellowed over time.  And as I snickered over why in the world I wrote down so many tofu recipes or low carb desserts I also caught my breath at the sight of my grandmother’s handwritten bunt cake instructions or her secret salad dressing that I wrote down while she dictated to me on one of the very last times she made it for our family.  What was initially an unwelcome housekeeping chore turned into an unexpected opportunity to meander through my personal food past.  It was a way to examine my own edible journey and in a larger sense, delivered snippets of time.  I flashed on scenes otherwise forgotten; my grandmother’s hand as she tipped the spice jar over her large wooden salad bowl, the record playing in the distance when I copied my best friend’s favorite chili recipe, my excitement at finding the ingredients to the best chai in the world from the vegetarian restaurant I worked at through college.  Every single item stuffed within that old pine box opened up a moment, and despite how relevant or appealing the actual recipe was that I came across, the simple fact that it called to me in some way at some point in time was what made each one special.  Through this food-focused lens, it provided retrospection and offered illumination about how I was feeling, what I was doing, and what was important to me over the years.

Since that day of destruction and rediscovery, I have actually followed a few recipes that had otherwise lay dormant.  Last weekend was honeyed sweet potato biscuits and when the recent storms blew and thundered by, I was kneading up some Slurry Bread, a classic go-to from the farm I lived and worked at after college.  Perhaps next I will chunk away at the dozens of brownie recipes I seem to impulsively acquire or finally make those New York Times chocolate chip cookies.  And maybe my experience will inspire you to take a gander at what lies within your own collection of recipe memories…

Straight out of my vast cookie recipe section, these ones are perfect for heating up a cold winter night.

“Hot Mama” Cookies

11/2 cups flour
¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp. Cinnamon
½ tsp. Black pepper, freshly ground
½ tsp. Cayenne pepper
½ tsp. salt
¾ cup unsalted butter (11/2 sticks), softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. Vanilla

Sift together flour, cocoa, spices and salt.  In a separate bowl, cream butter and sugar until fluffy.  Add egg and vanilla and combine thoroughly.  Mix in dry ingredients until just incorporated.  Refrigerate dough for about 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Pinch off pieces of chilled dough and roll into 1-inch balls.  Place on a parchment lined cookie sheet about 2 inches apart.  Press a fork dipped in flour or cocoa powder firmly into top of each cookie to create a criss-cross pattern.  Sprinkle with extra sugar if desired.  Bake 9-10 minutes, being careful not to over bake.  Remove to rack and cool completely.

Last year the owner of Asilomar, the CA State Parks department, signed a 20-year contract handing over the running of the property to Aramark, a national corporation with 260,000 employees. This led to some controversy at the recent Hazon sustainable food conference, where certain local, sustainable producers had their products rejected as donations for the conference. The reason? “Food Safety”, according to Aramark.

And now, this “Alcohol Announcement” from the 2010 EcoFarm program guide:

“Dear EcoFarm Friends! We know that celebration is a very important component of the EcoFarm Conference and you are probably noting a reduction of fun activities, especially reagarding the consumption of alcohol. The new Aramark management at Asilomar changed several longstanding policies regarding alcohol in the months leading up to the conference and we did not have time to figure out a new cost and activity structure to accommodate this. Therefore, we needed to cancel several bars and activities. We hope that you will still find plenty of fun – ask EcoFarm staff if you are looking for ideas! Thank you for your patience and understanding!”

I’m not that much of a drinker, and I did still have plenty of fun, but I understand a certain disappointment. Many farmers see this conference as their vacation for the year; its the one time they can kick back with their organic-growing buddies from across the country, talk shop, get inspired, and party. While I had a great time at this year’s conference, I can see how Aramark’s new management style might be just a signal that EcoFarm needs to move into a new phase. And sure enough, EcoFarm’s organizers are openly considering a move.

With 1,300 registered attendees and more who wanted to attend but couldn’t register, the popularity of ecological farming may finally be catching up with the EcoFarm community. The organizers really seem to know what they’re doing, helping us come together “for education, inspiration, and creative solution-building”. There are workshops for everyone; for the farmer, for the gardener, for the activist, for the policy wonk, some practical, some aesthetic, some en Español. Over the three years I’ve gone, I’ve learned what I love most about the conference (besides the conviviality, and the seed swap) is that I really come away inspired to continue working on these issues, with these people.

Particularly, I get inspired by talking to “heroes” of the movement, like Bob Scowcroft or Judith Redmond, who have done so much to advance the cause of just, sustainable food systems, yet remain so humble and approachable. Sure, it instills in me hope to know that progress can and has been made, but it also makes me think about how (personally) I am only at the beginning of my journey as an activist. My goal is not just to create change, it is to create change while having a good time and being good to people, and it’s nice to know that I have role models for that!

As for the conference itself, I’ve learned that I get the most out of the practical workshops, so the ones I attended were:
“High Quality Organic Wheat for the Local Whole-Grain Market”
“Advanced Soil Fertility Topics: The Wise Use of Micronutrients in Organic Farming”
“Farming With a Sharp Pencil!”
“Are Internships Illegal?”
and “Classical Plant Breeding for Improving Vegetable Crops.”

With the exception of the wheat one (where a UC researcher babbled about the chromosome locations of wheat/rye hybrids), I learned a lot. I learned how to be a better farm business planner. I learned that regulations intended to protect workers are ruining the prospects for on-farm internships (which have no doubt played a huge role in the expansion of ecological farming’s success). I learned the importance of proper Boron levels in your soil (and what to do if they’re out of whack). And, in the workshop which could have been titled “Dorkin’ Out on Seed Saving,” I learned how to effectively set the right genome composition of desired traits into a summer squash plant, over years of selection and growing.

The most theoretical session I went to was “Planting the Future: New Leaders in Activism for Food Justice.” This was a plenary, so all minds were on deck to ponder a newly-emphasized aspect of ecological farming: urban food access, and the various forms of environmental racism associated with food. This was a wonderful presentation, full of hope for more collaboration between social justice advocates and the ecological farming community. It made me think, however, about what the next step was. With so much press and emphasis on urban farming and urban food issues, you’d think that once people start growing food in the city, a sustainable food system is inevitable. But clearly this is too simple a read on the problem. I love that people are making efforts towards urban food self-sufficiency, but maybe we should think three steps ahead: we may be growing more of our own food in 20-30 years time, but we likely won’t be able to grow all of it. So I’d like to see a concurrent emphasis, along with urban food production, on connecting urban communities with their rural counterparts. This connection could be rooted in physical trade of food and work, but also serve to foster inter-cultural dialog. Obama may not be able to unite the country, but perhaps sustainable food can?

Honestly, after attending many other food conferences, I have almost nothing bad to say about this one. It was a blast, and I’m grateful to the organizers for sticking with it for 30 years. I encourage anyone who has ever been, or would like to go in the future, to contact EFA with your ideas for a new conference venue, or any other suggestions you can make to help them improve and expand the conference while maintaining its integrity.

Income Based Repayment (IBR) prevents payments on federal student loans from exceeding 15% of a borrower’s disposable income above 150% of the poverty level. This plan also allows for the government to subsidize 3 years of interest payments and to have any remaining debt erased after 25 years. It is the combination of IBR with Public Service Loan forgiveness that might allow more young people to look at farming as a viable career.

For example, under the most common farm financial circumstances (based on USDA statistics):

A farm family of four, with on-farm income of $10,000 and student loans totaling $45,000 at an interest rate of 6.8%:

• under Standard 10-year repayment they would pay $517 a month, totaling $62,143.00

• under IBR they would pay $0 a month, leaving a debt that would accrue interest over 25 years to well over a $100,000.00, greatly impairing their ability to borrow money in the future

• under IBR, with Public Service Loan Forgiveness, they would pay $0 a month, but with the government subsidizing the first 3 years of interest, they would only accrue 7 years of interest before forgiveness – greatly reducing their debt load and allowing for borrowing that could help grow their business or help their own children go to college

Under IBR with Public Service Loan Forgiveness, the same family:

• with an income of $20,000, would pay $0 a month

• with an income of $40000.00, would pay $87 a month, with total repayment equaling $10,400.00

• with an income of $70000.00, would pay $460 a month, with total prepayment equaling $55,200.00

This repayment schedule, Income Based Repayment coupled with Public Service Loan Forgiveness, is the best option for young, beginning, and new entry farmers. We need to reach out to our elected officials and help them recognize how beneficial Student Loan Forgiveness could be to the profession of farming and the future of agriculture.

I recently contacted my elected officials to propose that farming become one of the areas of employment eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. The following are the nuts and bolts of the request but you can find a sample letter that can be tailored to your own personal circumstances here.

If you are in need of assistance with repaying or dispatching your student loan, or simply care about the future of agriculture in this country, please take the time to contact your representatives and let them know that they can help build financial security for a new generation of farmers, and by extension their communities, by adding farming to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness plan.

In addition to the havoc being wreaked on the environment, one of the biggest trespasses of industrial agriculture has been the elimination of millions of jobs, resulting in the emptying out of rural communities worldwide. The repercussions of the loss of opportunity for rural America has been tragic: many towns are now plagued by dilapidated schools and poor health services, and a rising epidemic of methamphetamine use and production has filled in where more beneficial small businesses used to thrive.

This emptying out was never better cataloged than in John Steinbeck’s great novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Written in 1939 after Steinbeck had researched and reported for years on the plight of the American farm worker during the early industrialization of agriculture, he captured the phenomenon thusly:

And then the dispossessed were drawn west — from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless — restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do — to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut — anything, any burden to bear, for food.

As our Great Recession economy continues to shed jobs — an additional 85,000 were lost in December holding the unemployment rate at 10% — we should be creating opportunities in sustainable farming, the original, shovel-ready green job. Reconsidering what it is to farm will require completely new thinking about agriculture, combining the best of scientific knowledge while finding a balance between scale and community. Unfortunately, those who rely on the status quo of industrialized agriculture for their bacon see farming as a linear pursuit with one end: bigger farms using technical solutions — and thus fewer human actors.

Yet never before have we been so food insecure — 49 million Americans are currently not eating three meals per day, and one billion people in the world are hungry. The hungry cannot afford to eat — because there is too much labor in the world and not enough jobs. We claim to want to feed the world, but today’s farmers don’t even feed themselves; they make commodity products to be shipped far away and reformulated and sent back to their supermarket shelves. They do this because we’ve told them to, with our tax dollars and purchasing power. However, our system should not be about producing more food, but about producing better food on a human scale and cutting out the processors and the middlemen.

Stallman’s arguments against this smaller approach to agriculture ignores reality. There are still migrant workers doing backbreaking labor on farms often subject to doing the same monotonous movements for hours: picking tomatoes all day in the hot sun, or hand harvesting cotton (a common occurrence in light of the epidemic of superweeds in the south resistant to herbicides). By contrast, small farms are usually owned and worked primarily by the farmer. In addition, small farms are diversified to guarantee a profit through direct sales, and to stave off risk if one crop fails — and this just so happens to be a more worker-friendly (as the farmer gets to vary his/her work), resource efficient and an environmentally-conscious way to farm, too.

American policy makers have historically cowered in the face of the AFBF, but that organization is aging and old-fashioned. It’s time for politicians to see that another way is possible and that so much is at stake, and it’s time for new policies that reflect this knowledge. As the AFBF goes kicking and screaming into the 2010’s, it is worth remembering that America’s farmers (and most AFBF members) are on average 57 years old. We will need more farmers no matter what, however we hope to feed ourselves in the future, and newcomer farmers often do not agree with the climate change-denying AFBF. Second, we just don’t know whether sustainable agriculture can feed the world, but we do know that our current system has a ‘use by’ date, and that smaller, diversified systems have better yields and better protect our natural resources. Isn’t it worth a try? It would be unethical to continue the status quo knowing what we know about the nitrates heading downstream, topsoil loss, the fluctuating price of a barrel of oil, and of course, the fact that our children will die younger than we will because of what they eat.

It is time to revalue the farming profession and rebuild our communities again. It is time to break up the 10,000 acre farms into one hundred plots, and plant young people in the countryside who can use sustainable practices to rebuild the soil and bring it back to life.

Building a system that employs more farmers is not a step backwards, it is an acknowledgment of our respect for nature and a guarantee against future hunger. Perhaps we’ve lost Stallman’s generation on this front, both because industry has a strong hold on the AFBF and because it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. But farming is being reconsidered and changed as more and more young people realize the vital role they play in reinventing the food system and take up the challenge of doing it from scratch.

Land is a resource for the common good, and only small farms can rebuild what has been lost in rural America. This change will take the conscious effort by policy makers to go against the laissez-faire capitalism that has propelled us into industrial agriculture in the first place.

The Imperial Stock Ranch, which began in 1871, faces a new and serious challenge to its very survival: how to create new markets for its products to compensate for longstanding existing markets that have declined or shifted overseas. Some bold steps were needed to rethink what to do with the wool from the sheep they raise on their 30,000 acre ranch in Eastern Oregon. Their solution? Direct, value-added marketing to yarn retailers and apparel designers.

Jeanne Carver is following in a long tradition of farmers striving to distinguish their product in the marketplace—first and foremost by its quality, but also through processing, product enhancements, packaging, and suggestions for how consumers can use the product. As you watch the video, note the four key areas where producers focus their efforts in order to achieve success:

1. Identify your product and its market potential: What do we have and what does it need to become to be able to sell it for a profit?
2. Determine what processing is required: How will we convert our raw product into the saleable items that consumers are looking for?
3. Create a marketing package: What is it about your product that is of special value to buyers of your product, and what is the best way to get that message across?
4. Develop a plan for how to market and sell your product: What steps will be needed to get my product to the marketplace and who can help me make that happen?

This video was funded by the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and produced by Cooking Up A Story. SARE provides grants to farmers, ranchers, researchers and educators in order to advance food and farming systems that are profitable, environmentally sound and good for communities. SARE is proud of its connections to farming communities across the country and encourages those who wish to learn more to visit their website www.sare.org. SARE is a program of the USDA Cooperative State Research Education and Extension Service.

Photo Courtesy of Imperial Stock Ranch. All Rights Reserved.

Originally published on Cooking Up a Story

We need healthcare. Many of us cannot afford it. Farming is physical labor with physical risks and with great demands on performance over time. As a nation served by many workers, some unionized, some wearing uniforms, we recognize the importance of retaining skilled practitioners with benefits. Our firefighters, coast guards and electricians are all provided with benefits, and healthcare. Why not farmers? Our enlisted soldiers and their families are provided with coverage for their service. Why not our farmers?

The reclaiming of our local economy will hopefully, in the next decade, be characterized by greater institutional regionalism. This means schools and hospitals buying food from local farms, this means deep partnerships of commerce within residential districts and within agricultural districts. In order to succeed at this level of engagement, the farmers will negotiate the hurdles of liability, red tape and logistics of rescaling. We’ll be operating forklifts and mid-sized delivery vans; we’ll be scaling up production. We will spend a lot of time resizing, retrofitting and rethinking systems of food production and distribution, in real time, and at real physical risk to ourselves. This is important work. We cannot lose the hardworking members of the team to illness and injury. We cannot lose any fingers or toes. We cannot afford for our farmers to be distracted by financial worry associated with the birth of
a child or the infection of a blister. We need to provide health coverage for farmers, young and old, owners and workers, for the longevity of the sector and of the nation.

Lobbying for these issues is crucial. Are you interested in joining our National Young Farmers Coalition and working with partners to figure out possible solutions to the affordable health care situation? Please join the Greenhorns mailing list so that we can keep you in the loop. And read more about what’s happening on the ground for young farmers in our newsletter, the Greenhorns Circular.