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.

“Although few Americans outside of the livestock industry have ever heard of ractopamine, the drug is controversial,” Bottemiller writes. “Fed to an estimated 60 to 80 percent of pigs in the United States, it has sickened or killed more of them than any other livestock drug on the market, Food and Drug Administration records show. Cattle and turkeys have also suffered high numbers of illnesses from the drug.”

According to the story, USDA meat inspectors have reported an increase in “downer pigs”–livestock that is unable to walk–who have been fed ractopamine. On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously voted down a California ban on “downer” livestock being used in the food supply, on the basis of a federal preemption.

Bottemiller explains that ractopomine acts like a stress hormone, increasing heart rate and relaxing blood vessels. Its use in livestock agriculture produces up to 10 percent more meat, raising profits $2 per head. Though the drug has not been considered for human use, it is administered up until slaughter, and minute traces have been found in meat.

While these amounts have not exceeded the threshold the FDA has deemed safe, there is no allowance for the drug in the E.U. and China, where 70 percent of the world’s pork is consumed, and where the drug is currently banned. Acceptance of meat from animals raised on ractopamine in world markets has become a focus for U.S. trade officials. Bottemiller writes: “Resolving the impasse is now a top agricultural trade priority for the Obama administration, which is trying to boost exports and help revive the economy.”

At the heart of the trade dispute lies questions about the safety of the drug. Elanco, the maker of ractopamine, sold under the name Paylean, conducted the studies considered before approval of the drug in 2000, and has reported “no averse effects were observed for any treatments.” However, within a few years of the drug’s approval, the FDA received hundreds of reports from farmers, veterinarians, and USDA inspectors of sickened pigs.

Now the issue remains at an impasse at the U.N.’s Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets global food-safety guidelines. The commission has sought to set a standard for residue levels of ractopamine in meat. With such standards in place, Washington would be in a position to challenge countries with bans on ractopamine at the World Trade Organization. China and the E.U. are the main countries blocking the residue limit at Codex. In China, organ meats, which contain the highest traces of the drug, are popular fare, and in the E.U. officials do not want to risk public outcry by importing meat raised with growth-promoting drugs, which are illegal there.

Bottemiller reported this story in conjunction with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, the first and only independent, non-profit news organization that produces investigative journalism in the critically underreported areas of food, agriculture, and environmental health. This is the second story of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, previous stories can be found here. [Full disclosure: I am the Managing Editor of that venture.]

You can read the full report here at MSNBC.com. You can also find additional reporting here on testing of ractopamine as well as more details about the process underway at Codex here on the Food & Environment Reporting Network’s Web site.

Scores of books depict farms as little slices of heaven on earth, where venison is smoked and butter is churned, and things seem perfect. But today’s farmers are far from unrealistic dreamers, longing for a Little House on the Prairie-esque pastoral ideal. They’re socially conscious doers. And when asked about books that inspire them, they cite writings that are practical, at times poetic, and that beckon them to rescue the land.

Here are some of the books that farmers are reading and getting inspiration from today.

The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry. “I had spent  seven or so years of my life as a ‘punk’ growing up in the the central NJ suburbs of NYC, disgruntled and disillusioned and looking for real meaning and ways to be in the world, and [Berry] was someone seemingly so disgruntled and disillusioned, yet incredibly intelligent and coherent, with a posited solution of sorts…. Challenges [were] laid forth to take full responsibility for our lives and to truly push against what our culture is feeding us, to move towards a society built around community, equality, a new free culture, and a cooperative economy in which we all work satisfying jobs in support of each other; ideals I cannot imagine any human being would deface. Farming could embrace these challenges and reconnect us with the land and each other like no other, I was convinced.” — Anthony Mecca, Great Song Farm

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. “I read The Good Earth when I was a child, I think I was ten or eleven. I read it again in my 20s, and again in my 30s…. It’s an inspiring novel about building a dream, perseverance. I think the best line is at the end of the novel when it says, ‘without land, you’re nothing.’ It’s a quote my father and mother used to repeat to us kids all the time. So that book always meant something for many reasons.” — Alexis Koefoed, Soul Food Farm

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. “I read it as a freshman in college. This was kind of a critical treatise in the ecological movement. It was not only a cry of protest, but a teaching document about the basic principles of ecology. [Carson] was drawing connections between the different layers that make up the environment… how the chemical sprays in the ground migrated into the trees. The book had layers—one layer was science, one was critique, and one was art—the art of protest. It was also very poetic—what do we cherish more than the sound of birds in the spring?And I thought the fusion of those things really appealed to me as a young woman, and guided what kinds of actions I would take in my life. “ — Severine von Tscharner-Fleming, farmer and founder of The Greenhorns.

How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine by John Jeavons. “My copy of this one is missing its cover and several of the front pages and the binding has been chewed up by a dog. I like that John explains a complete farming system that minimizes the use of commercial and outside inputs that will work nearly worldwide.  He even looks at the calories produced, and includes fruit trees, and compost growing areas as part of the garden design and process… I wanted to farm because it is good honest work and it provides something that people truly need.  John Jeavons is telling people all over the world how they can farm and produce the food they need with very few tools, little money and fertilizer, and using open-pollinated seeds.” — Brenton Johnson, Johnson’s Backyard Garden

The Contrary Farmer by Gene Lodgson. “I read The Contrary Farmer about eight years ago.  I think this book really helped me formulate the idea about what it meant to be a farmer.  Lodgson painted a beautiful, yet realistic picture of the farming lifestyle and the sacrifices a farmer must make.  It brought me to the conclusion that I could achieve this lifestyle for myself and my family.” — Jacqueline Smith, Green Dirt Farm.

Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon by Pablo Neruda. “Judith [Winfrey] and I really did not come to farming in a direct fashion. Early on in our relationship we fell in love with food, travel, revolutionaries, ecology, and community.  The decision to farm seemed like a natural way to wed most of these fascinations… Neruda is amazing in all of his words, but his Odes really resonate with people who love food and its power to create interaction.  We still read “Ode to the Onion” once a year.” — Joe Reynolds, Gaia Gardens/Love is Love Farm.

Alternative Urban Futures: Planning for Sustainable Development in Cities throughout the World by Raquel Pinderhughs. “What motivated me most was that Raquel conveys a vision using practical models from around the world. She was my inspiration to take what would have been just a house and a garden and work to transform it into a living renewing system.” — Esperanza Pollana, Pluck and Feather Farm.

It’s a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life by Keith Stewart. “This book provided a lot of inspiration while I was starting to farm … Not because it’s a perfect book, or because I agree with everything the author did or believes, but because it provides a very interesting story of becoming an organic farmer (with warts and all). The guy hadn’t farmed before and showed what he went through in setting up a farm and carving out a niche.” — Fred Hempel, Baia Nicchia

We Didn’t Have Much but We Sure Had Plenty: Rural Women in Their Own Words by Sherry Thomas. “I was originally inspired to farm because of the farms I grew up around in Skippack, PA.  But as farms left my community, I was left thinking it wasn’t a good career to get into.  Many things re-inspired me to start growing my own food in my early 20s, but [this] book stands out. it was a bunch of stories of women who worked their land as a job and for personal consumption. Most were very poor, but were able to tend to their nutritional needs because of farming/food preservation. It reminded me of the importance of simplifying life and just how vital feeding yourself from your own garden can be.” — Barbara Finnin, City Slicker Farm

The New Organic Grower: a Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener, by Eliot Coleman. “I got my first farming book back when I was 25 yrs. old in 1988, and [Coleman] continues to revise the book to stay current.  This is a basic how-to organic farm book, but it’s very inspiring and gives great information for the modern day gardener.  Elliot himself is an amazing grower, who invents unique farming tools and is always looking for new/better ways to grow vegetables.  This book is still my “go to” reference book and I use it to turn people on to growing food. Since I’m a New Englander and he is part of the Maine growing community he’s always appealed to me.” — Simon Richard,  Sonoma Farms (Bi-Rite Farms)

“Heirloom” is an interesting term, and like the word “sustainability,” it means different things to different people. Recently, I read The Heirloom Life Gardener, a book written by Jere and Emilee Gettle. The Gettles are the co-founders of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, which publishes a lush and incredibly informative seed catalog and has spun off a variety of gardening-related enterprises across the nation.

The Gettles define heirloom seeds as being “nonhybrid and open-pollinated” and as usually having been in circulation for more than 50 years. Some heirloom seed types currently in use could have been found in Thomas Jefferson garden at Monticello. Some appear more recently, during the Great Depression, including the Mortgage Lifter tomato (who couldn’t use one of these in today’s economy?).

While reading the Gettles’ book, I began thinking once again about the relationship between land and the American character. I was inspired to pull some of my favorite books off the shelf and revisit them, to consider the notion of “civic agriculture.”

The term “civic agriculture”–coined by the former Thomas Lyson of Cornell–is used by some to refer to the movement towards locally based agricultural models that tightly link community, social and economic development. Models of civic agriculture include CSAs, farmer’s markets, roadside stands, urban agriculture, community gardens, and farm-to-school/farm-to-institution programs. I also argue that civic agriculture includes school and home gardens . . . any place where people seek to connect land to the development of community or as an expression of engagement or citizenship.

The civic aspect of agriculture is much older than the current local food movement; it hearkens back to the nations founding. The connection between land and democracy has always held real meaning in American culture. Jeffersonian ideals about the civic virtues and value of gardening and agriculture were prevalent and shaped American cultural and political life; the U.S. Department of Agriculture, created in 1862, was called “The People’s Department” by President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln once told a group of Wisconsin farmers that as long as Americans knew how to cultivate even the smallest plot of land, that the nation’s citizens would be free from kings and moneylenders, free from oppression of all sorts.

Federal legislation such as the Morrill Act (The sesquicentennial is in 2012) created America’s land-grant institutions, which still have as a primary purpose research and education in support of the nation’s agricultural producers. (Land-grant institutions through their Master Gardener programs also support home and community gardeners). The Homestead Act, also passed in 1862, and linked the cultivation of land to the protection of the Union and the expansion of democracy during the nation’s Civil War. We were a nation of farmers at origin; we are still a nation of farmers at heart.

You farm, and we garden. Gardening links the myth and the practice of agriculture to one another. In practice, gardening is agriculture on a personal scale; it represents an individual’s relationship to a specific piece of land. This is a kind of relationship worth investing in.

As you formulate your goals and hopes for the New Year, I hope that you’ll consider adding another resolution to your list: to embark upon a gardening activity, no matter how small, in 2012. Occupy the possibilities that gardens create at our homes, and in our communities.

Originally published on Farm Progress

For years, agriculture and the food system have been critically under-reported subjects in the media. Take for example earlier this year, when Gannett (the parent company of USA Today) laid off Phillip Brasher, one of the last reporters covering agriculture issues in Washington, D.C. Thanks to a public outcry (and in part to reporting here on Civil Eats and elsewhere) he was rehired. However, this made clear that the desire for food reporting is not being sufficiently met by the current media structure.

The Food & Environment Reporting Network, a journalism non-profit for investigative reporting in the area of food, agriculture, and environmental health, which launches operations today, is seeking to reverse this trend. (Full disclosure: I am the Managing Editor and a Founding Director of the project).

“Over the past four decades, coverage of food and agriculture has waned in the mainstream press at the same time as the impact of a more industrialized food system on public health has become increasingly severe,” said Ruth Reichl, editorial board member of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, Editorial Advisor to Gilt Taste, Editor-at-Large at Random House, and former Editor-in-Chief of Gourmet magazine. “Without detailed investigations into food and agriculture, our understanding of humanity’s impacts on the environment is incomplete and related policy changes ineffective.”

In its first report, out today in the western magazine High Country News, reporter Stephanie Paige Ogburn investigates a successful citizen movement to halt pollution by New Mexico’s powerful mega-dairy operations. Future reporting will appear in newsmagazines, including The American Prospect and The Nation, as well as major daily newspapers. You can read the current piece here on the Food & Environment Reporting Networks’s Web site, where future reporting will also be archived.

“Our stories will fall under the classic mandate of investigative reporting–to reveal corruption, abuse of power, and exploitation wherever it happens; to expose activities that the powerful work to keep hidden or to explore subjects that are just too complex for the breaking news cycle,” said the Food & Environment Reporting Network’s Editor-in-Chief Samuel Fromartz. “We’ve chosen to focus on food, agriculture, and environmental health specifically because we feel these are under-reported subjects that touch people’s lives every day.”

The Food & Environment Reporting Network’s Board of Directors includes Editor-in-Chief Samuel Fromartz, author, freelance journalist and a former Reuters business editor; Allison Arieff, a contributing columnist for The New York Times, contributing columnist for The Atlantic Cities, and editor of the Urbanist magazine for SPUR (San Francisco Planning & Urban Research Association); and Ralph Loglisci, a leading food policy media strategist. Naomi Starkman is the strategic communications adviser to the project. Tom Laskawy is the Executive Director and manages the organization. Former board members Katrina Heron and Naomi Starkman were involved in the organization’s founding and development.

The Food & Environment Reporting Network’s editorial board includes Brian Halweil, editor of Edible East End and co-publisher of Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan magazines; Katrina Heron, Editor-at-Large at Newsweek/The Daily Beast and previously Editor-in-Chief of WIRED and a senior editor at The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times magazines; Ruth Reichl Editorial Advisor to Gilt Taste, Editor-at-Large at Random House, and former Editor-in-Chief of Gourmet magazine; Elizabeth Royte, author of the critically acclaimed Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash; Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It; and Charles Wilson, the co-author with Eric Schlosser of the number one New York Times children’s bestseller Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food.

You can stay informed about the Food & Environment Reporting Network’s work via Twitter and Facebook.

The attacks coming from economists against the local and sustainable food movement sound a lot like this joke: The arguments are based in flawed assumptions, obfuscated by fancy charts, big words, and complex calculations. 

Consider this most recent rant, “The Inefficiency of Local Food,” on the Freakonomics blog by economist Steven Sexton, who challenges the claim that “relocalized” food systems can be as efficient as today’s modern farming. He writes, “Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies.”

Let’s start with Sexton’s assertion that industrial agriculture’s high yields can be attributed in part to specialization and trade—gains presumably lost when we “locavores” start frequenting farmers’ market. He writes, “The case for specialization is perhaps nowhere stronger than in agriculture, where the costs of production depend on natural resource endowments, such as temperature, rainfall, and sunlight, as well as soil quality, pest infestations, and land costs.”

When I was in graduate school, our economics textbooks spun this old yarn, too. It’s based in the theory of “comparative advantage,” dating back to classical economist David Ricardo’s writings in the 19th century. Specialization, argued Ricardo, makes sense because regions and countries should grow what best suits their climate and soils and then trade for what grows best elsewhere.

But when Ricardo extolled the benefits of comparative advantage, “capital” couldn’t move. Now that corporations can, and do, this theory no longer holds. In fact, regional or national agricultural comparative advantage often reflects nothing “natural” at all, but rather the extreme imbalances in power in our food system that enable those at the pinnacle to more heartlessly exploit the land and the workers lacking power.

To choose but one example: Ricardo’s theory doesn’t explain why North Carolina jumped from a bit player in the hog industry to number two, after Iowa, just in the past few decades. The key was the state’s concessions that lured the hog confinement industry, including its weak environmental and labor laws.

Of course it doesn’t make sense to try to grow mangoes on rooftop farms in Manhattan, but contrary to what Sexton implies, that’s not what regional food advocates suggest. Indeed, one of advocates’ core tenets is that the healthiest diet, for eaters and the planet, prioritizes choosing foods that grow well where we are, when they are in-season or when they can be stored, and considers those mangoes a special treat.

Sexton’s other hit on the efficiency of sustainable farming is that its yields don’t measure up. As a result, he says, shifting to a regional food system would require “more inputs to grow a given quantity of food, including more land and more chemicals.” But his calculations are based on assuming we’re not reconsidering what we grow or how we grow it.

But locavores and regional food advocates aren’t suggesting we try to plant Iowa-like monoculture corn farms in New York’s Hudson Valley; we’re arguing we need to radically rethink not only where we source our food, but what we plant and what methods we use.

Most American industrial farm acreage, for example, is devoted not to growing food for people to eat directly, but to grow commodity crops like corn and soybeans that are mainly used as inputs—for livestock production, ethanol, and industrial products. In addition, the American industrial food system wastes as much as half the food we could all be consuming. This waste embedded in the industrial model and its squandering of vital farmland for non-food production is enough to shake your head at the economist who praises its alleged efficiency—or suggests that by shifting away from this model we are putting the planet at a greater risk for hunger.

Sexton misses two other important points. For one, those industrial yield figures start looking a lot less impressive when you consider the cost by which we’ve achieved them—and especially when you learn that those costs are ones we need not pay. High yields from industrial agriculture rely entirely on external inputs—most of them in the finite, nonrenewable, we’re-not-gonna-have-them-in-fifty-years category.

Consider, for example, that in the Midwest we’re outstripping the nation’s largest source of groundwater faster than we’re replenishing it. A recent peer-reviewed study published by the National Academies Press concluded that if we don’t shift away from this industrial model, the Ogallala aquifer—which one-quarter of the farmers growing corn, soy, and cotton and 40 percent of those raising feedlot beef rely on for water—will be completely drawn down in a few decades.

Using new techniques to track soil erosion, scientists at the Environmental Working Group  found that vast swaths of Iowa and other Corn Belt states were losing their rich topsoil soil at rates many times faster than official estimates had assumed. Industrial monoculture methods leave the soil bare for most of the year and relying on external inputs for fertility defeats the build up of healthy soil—both practices make land vulnerable to erosion.

By definition, industrial agriculture relies on applying manmade fertilizer year-upon-year. But relying on external inputs for farming’s key macronutrients—nitrogen, potash, phosphorus—comes at big costs. While nitrogen is abundant in our atmosphere, to “bind” it into a usable form requires an enormous amount of energy–often natural gas. In China, 70 percent of nitrogen fertilizer production is powered by coal-fired plants.

The widespread use of phosphorus in industrial agriculture–by 2008 industrial agriculture was applying 17 million metric tons annually–has led to what some experts call “the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.” Relatively rare on the Earth’s crust, phosphorus is mined from ancient marine deposits, but it’s running out. Some say that within 30 to 40 years we may have none left. Plus, for every ton of phosphorus we mine, we produce five tons of radioactive waste. Today, the U.S. is home to more than one billion tons of this waste stored in 70 towers, ranging from just a few acres wide to some the size of 720 football fields.  In addition, we’re using more potent pesticides than ever, yet despite massive chemical pesticide use, we still face significant crop loss due to pests.

The second point Sexton misses is that strong yields don’t necessarily require chemical inputs and egregious water overuse. Truly sustainable growers know how to grow abundant food without all these external inputs: They recycle nutrients, employ natural methods to repel pests and conquer weeds, and tap ecological sources for fertility, like nitrogen-fixing cover crops. And guess what? Yields hold. In one crop-by-crop analysis over three decades, organic corn yields held steady per acre with conventional ones. Even more notably, during drought years the organic fields, with quality soil structure that retain water better, had 31 percent higher corn yields than conventional ones.

Studies are coming in from around the world—from the UK government to the United Nations to the OECD—that innovative sustainable farming techniques can match industrial agriculture in yields. And, when and if yields are lower, the lower output is more than made up for in reduced costs (both financial and societal) of inputs, better nutritional quality, improved soil and biodiversity, and more. In one of the largest studies of its kind, researchers at the University of Essex analyzed 286 farming projects in 57 countries, including 12.6 million farmers transitioning towards agricultural sustainability, and found a yield increase of 79 percent across a wide variety of crop types. Take a look at just those projects in East Africa and the increase in yields jumped 116 percent when sustainable farming approaches were introduced.

But, despite the evidence, Sexton and other economists with their collective blinders on still argue that the only way to feed the planet is with the industrial agriculture methods they endorse. Sure, that works. Just assume unlimited water, fossil fuels, petrochemicals, potash, phosphorus, topsoil, land, stable climate, and endless storage for radioactive waste. Just assume farmers can keep paying for these expensive inputs. And, assume all of us can afford the environmental and health consequences.

You’ll also need to ignore the plain fact that industrial agriculture has already proven unable to feed the world: Globally, we’re now producing over 20 percent more food per person than the late 1960s, but there are more hungry people—now almost a billion. Fixated narrowly on production, industrial agricultural so concentrates power that people go hungry no matter how much we grow.

So, ignore all that; assume the can opener.

If, however, you’d rather join me in the real world—where the occasional economist resides—and where natural resources are preciously limited and where farmers prefer not to pay dearly for inputs or be poisoned by pesticides, you’ll see that the most effective way to feed the world is to embrace a food system based in ecological systems and common sense.

The potential to improve our current food policy is currently being challenged by a select group of Senate and House agriculture committees who propose $23 billion in cuts to federal spending on some of the most important programs related to nutrition and the future of small-scale, local, and organic farming. The 2012 Farm Bill could be rewritten as early as November 23. It’s vital that these issues be debated in a public forum, not behind closed doors.

Take Action Today
There is still time to participate in the fight for reform that supports new farmers, provides infrastructure for regional and local food development, and protects our health and precious land.

Here are some ways you can get involved in influencing the 2012 Farm Bill:

Call. Take 30 seconds to call leaders of the House and Senate ag committees and say NO to the “Secret Farm Bill.” Over 27,000 people have done so already using the Food Democracy Now call script. You can also support the development of local and regional farms, farmers, and retail markets by asking your two senators and your representative to co-sponsor the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act.
Meet. To date, there are over 7,000 farmers markets nationwide. Get to know your local farmers. Listen to their stories. Ask them questions about the Farm Bill. The more you understand about the challenges that small-scale farmers face, the larger your role can be in supporting their farms and marketplaces.

Explore. Find out about programs intended for inclusion in the 2012 Farm Bill. Learn about the new Beginning Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act, which supports novice farmers by creating jobs, affordable farmland, and farmer training programs. Or read about the pre-existing Wetlands Reserve Program, which has improved watershed health and secured protection and restoration for 11,000 private landowners on 2.3 million acres of land over the past 20 years.

Review. Learn a brief history of the Farm Bill to understand key programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which currently represents more than two-thirds of the Farm Bill funding and faces multibillion-dollar cuts.

Originally published on Nourish

Don’t you think someone who made $10.7 million in 2010 from a company whose profit primarily depends on chemical agriculture might have a bias in the matter? Yes, it would be understandable to think Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of the Board of Nestlé, might. It also might be understandable to want to know what others, those without such a financial interest in the food status quo, think about the viability of non-industrial agriculture. But in the FastCompany.com article, like other press that pooh-poohs organic farming, those who disagree, if they’re mentioned at all, are portrayed as marginal or unqualified to speak to the issue.

In FastCompany.com, the other side is represented by unnamed (and unquoted) “nutrition professors and some food scientists.” No offense to nutrition professors and food scientists, but what if you had, instead, learned that the viability, efficiency, and safety of industrial agriculture is being questioned not only by professors and some food scientists but by countless agronomists, food security experts, economists, epidemiologists, public health experts all around the world? What if instead of “nutrition professors and some food scientists,” you heard about the numerous peer-reviewed and meta-studies that contradict Brabeck-Letmathe’s claims.

You’d be more informed, that’s for sure, and you might just begin to see the spin behind Brabeck-Letmathe’s messaging. He has three main talking points to defend fossil fuel-, chemical-, and water-intensive industrial agriculture. Brabeck-Letmathe raises each with strategic discipline: First, he claims that organic farming is a luxury; secondly, that it doesn’t produce food that’s any better for you; and finally (and much worse) that organic food can kill you.

This three-part spin-doctoring should start sounding familiar. I’ve been hearing it reported by uncritical media for more than a decade, dating all the way back to a 20/20 episode with John Stossel in 2000 and to the op-ed pages of one of Canada’s top newspapers, the Globe and Mail. In 2008 Brabeck-Letmathe told the paper, “We cannot feed the world on organic products.” That same year he delivered the same line to the Financial Times. Today, he tells FastCompany.com: “There’s no way you can support life on earth if you go straight from farm to table.”

Yet, numerous studies on the efficiency and future viability of industrial agriculture—especially in an increasingly resource-constrained and climate-unstable planet—keep proving the opposite is true: we cannot support life on earth unless we shift away from industrial agriculture systems.

Consider that in the United States alone, 27 percent of our nation’s farmland is dependent on fossil water from the Olglalla aquifer and we’re depleting it at a rate so fast that in a few decades there could be none left.

Or, consider that chemical runoff from industrial farms throughout the Midwest, especially synthetic fertilizer, creates a Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico every year that kills off aquatic life on the ocean floor and can grow to the size of New Jersey.

Or, consider that one of the three macronutrients industrial farmers rely on for fertilizer, phosphorus—found in the phosphate-bearing rock mainly in Morocco, China, South Africa, Jordan, and the United States—is increasingly rare. Some experts suggest we’ve already passed peak phosphorus; we will find it increasingly difficult to mine for the stuff. And, every ton that we do secure produces five tons of radioactive waste. Today, the U.S. is home to more than one billion tons of this waste now stored in 70 locations, some towering as high as a 20-story building and some as large as 720 football fields.

Meanwhile, studies have found that ecological farming practices, of which organic agriculture is one, can significantly improve water usage efficiency and eliminate farmers’ dependence on petroleum-based chemicals and synthetic fertilizer ingredients, including phosphorus.

And what to make of Brabeck-Letmathe’s second talking point: “From a nutritional point of view studies show no nutritional difference from bio [or organic] to other foods.”

We certainly need more studies assessing the nutritional differences between food items, but research is already turning up positive results—for organic foods. We already know, for instance, that studies of children’s consumption of organic versus conventional foods found those eating organic foods had lower detectable pesticide metabolites. We also know that last year’s President’s Cancer Panel noted that many chemicals used on industrial farms are known or suspected carcinogenic or disrupt our hormone systems, mimicking testosterone or estrogen. The Panel’s recommendation? Stay away from foods raised with pesticides, hormones, or antibiotics. Without calling it by name, the panel was saying: Be safer, go organic.

Finally, Brabeck-Letmathe adds the zinger: Not only is organic food not more nutritious: “it’s more dangerous.” Organic foods in Europe are “often fertilized with livestock manure,” he says, “and people don’t always realize they need to wash it thoroughly.”

More than ten years ago, Dennis Avery, from the Hudson Institute-funded Center for Global Food Issues, made the same attack on 20/20. Avery warned then that organic produce is likely infested with “nasty strains of bacteria” because it is “fertilized with manure.” A wide-eyed Barbara Walters asked, “I’ve been buying organic food. It is more expensive. But it isn’t dangerous?”

Yes, to the typical consumer—and FastCompany.com reader or 20/20 viewer—fertilizing crops with manure probably sounds gross. But Brabeck-Letmathe and Avery conveniently neglect to mention a few things: First, while some organic farmers do use manure as fertilizer, they must do so following strict guidelines so that potentially dangerous bacteria—the kind that has Brabeck-Letmathe so worried—are naturally eliminated. Plus, manure is not the only source of fertilizer for organic farmers. In fact, it’s not even the preferred source. Many organic farmers use no manure at all, preferring instead nitrogen-fixing crops like legumes that naturally pull nitrogen from the atmosphere and make it bioavailable in the soil. Often called green manure, the organic farmer integrates these fertility methods with many others.

These two also neglect to mention that industrial farms also fertilize fields with manure, only without any regulation or oversight. And then, there’s sewage sludge. Industrial farmers can use it; organic ones cannot. (By the way, Avery’s misstatements on 20/20 were eventually retracted by producers online. But I wonder how many people saw the televised episode and how many read the retraction?)

In the FastCompany.com article with Brabeck-Letmathe trotting out this tripartite critique of organic food, he concludes by saying that the demand for organic food has hit a peak. “It will stay the same… I don’t think it will grow much more than it is.”

Need I remind you who you’re listening to? The Chairman of the Board of Nestlé, a man who makes millions of dollars a year selling the world on Nestlé products, including everything from Cinnamon Toast Crunch to Butterfinger and Laffy Taffy and increasingly prepared and frozen foods. In other words, someone with a stake in ensuring that few of us turn to real, whole, organic foods or, even, cook for ourselves anymore. (As the U.S. Chairman and CEO of the company said recently, he was “feeling good about its focus on frozen foods” since, “cooking has become a lost art in the United States.”)

Maybe what we hear in FastCompany.com is a note of Brabeck-Letmathe’s defensiveness? After all, the growth of the movement of food producers allied with consumers who are rejecting short-sighted industrial agriculture, choosing to cook real food, and connecting in direct relationship with farmers means one thing to Nestlé: Loss of market share.

And while Brabeck-Letmathe would like you to believe that demand for organic food is coming just from “elite, wealthier” consumers in the U.S. and E.U.—and, indeed, leveling off here, he couldn’t be more wrong. The movement of eaters choosing organic foods and of food producers embracing agroecological practices is not just gaining ground in the U.S. and the E.U., but all around the world, from the foothills of the Himalayas to the plains of Central Brazil and the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. For a man like Brabeck-Letmathe, that must be scary stuff.

Seattle is where Asian America intersects with food and environmental justice, as I discovered when I spoke there recently as part of a “Sustainable Growth Summit” convened by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Seattle embodies the diversity, contradictions and great talent that define our Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community: wealth and poverty, hunger and abundance, access or exclusion based on citizenship and English language proficiency.

Thus it made sense that the event was held at North Seattle Community College, which recently received Federal designation as an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution. Many don’t know that the largest sector of AAPI college enrollment (47 percent) is at community colleges; NSCC President Mark Mitsui began the day describing their college’s new sustainability efforts (including cafeteria composting) and reminding visitors to count community colleges as key partners in building the so-called “green economy.”

I led a panel on “Local Foods for Economic Development,” and it attracted a diverse and opinionated mix of students, farmers, activists and one food-justice bookseller. WHIAAPI Commissioner Kamuela Enos is the director of education programs at Ma’o Organic Farms in Oahu, Hawaii and a rising star of the AAPI sustainable agriculture movement. The program he works with trains community college students in organic farming and wholesale and retail sales, with an emphasis on traditional crops and indigenous farming techniques. Wearing cheery shirts with the company motto “No Panic, Go Organic!” students learn how to sell high-quality produce through various channels including a local CSA, farmers markets, and to chefs across the Islands. Ma’o is accomplishing all this in an area in Oahu with levels of poverty near 20 percent, with some census tracts exceeding 50 percent.

A more sobering perspective was offered by Washington State Extension Officer Bee Cha, who coordinates their Hmong Outreach Program. While the farmers he works with are experts at fruit, vegetable and flower cultivation, language and cultural barriers have made it difficult for them to achieve financial stability. Hmong farmers enliven Pike Place Market with a stunning cornucopia of flowers, but Bee described their difficulties breaking into the higher-margin wedding and corporate flower market.

Finally, USDA Washington State Business & Cooperative Programs Director Tuana Jones shared some of the tools her office can offer to AAPI farmers and entrepreneurs: assistance setting up a cooperative, grant programs for cold storage and marketing assistance, connections to farmers markets, and more. I used to work with Rural Development (which administers the Business and Cooperative Programs) in Washington, DC and have great respect for their work. Under the Obama administration they’ve made local and regional foods a new priority, and Tuana spoke expertly on their work in that arena.

There is a rich history of AAPIs in farming, fishing, canning and food retail in Seattle, and the day after the Summit I toured the historic Chinatown/International District. We visited Danny Woo Community Garden, a glorious patch of green in the middle of the city managed by Interim CDA, a community development and low-income housing provider. The garden is tended by elderly gardeners and their young apprentices, who celebrate the harvest every year with a free Filipino-style “Pig Roast” in the garden. Seattle is a backyard chicken mecca (city government named 2010 the Year of Urban Agriculture), and the Danny Woo Garden recently expanded their chicken coops and added an affordable “Urban Farm Camp” for local children to learn about chickens, food and agriculture.

Some of the greatest ideas in food justice and sustainability are being born in Seattle’s AAPI communities. I hope the rest of the country takes note, and Seattleites, please let me know what I missed in the comments below.

UPDATE: After this piece was published, I received additional statistics from Bee Cha of Washington State Extension: Roughly 80% of Hmong farmers in the area grow flowers, and out of about 90 Hmong farms in Washington, only 4 farmers own their land. Access to markets is especially important for these hardworking flower growers.

Here’s a link to the immigrant farmers program he works with:

In case you missed the announcement, this week is National Farmers Market Week. No matter. If you shop regularly at one of the more than 7,000 markets across the country, every week is farmers market week. That’s true in my neighborhood, where FreshFarm Markets started the first producer-only farmers market in Washington, D.C., 14 years ago.

When I relocated to D.C. from New York, I had no idea I was moving to a food desert. Although Dupont Circle wasn’t poor by any means, we had limited access to healthy, fresh food. There was one small supermarket we called the “Soviet” Safeway because there were usually long lines and nothing on the shelves. The produce there was pitiful: The tomatoes, picked green and reddened with ethylene gas, could break your teeth.

FreshFarm came to the rescue in 1997 with 15 small, family farms hawking fruit, vegetables and flowers on Sundays from early July to mid-November. That first season attracted 21,000 customers. Today, the market boasts 42 stands selling fruit, vegetables, meat, cheese, eggs, seafood, baked goods, flowers and plants every Sunday all year round. Last year it drew some 162,000 shoppers.

But that’s not all. Over the last decade, FreshFarm, a nonprofit spun off from American Farmland Trust in 2002, set up 10 other one-day-a-week markets in the region, which collectively attracted more than 350,000 customers last year.

These markets have not only been a boon for area residents hungry for tasty, locally produced food, they provide a lifeline for regional farmers–and create jobs in rural areas. Some 150 family farms in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia now sell their goods at one or more of the FreshFarm Markets, and there are now some 40 other farmers markets run by other organizations within 10 miles of Dupont Circle.

Why aren’t these farmers selling their bounty to grocery store chains? “Grocery stores are not set up to buy from small local farmers, they’re worried about adequate supply, and they won’t pay a fair price,” said Bernadine “Bernie” Prince, cofounder of FreshFarm Markets. “Without local farmers markets, local farmers were not making it financially.”

With farmers markets, on the other hand, local family farms are not only making it, they are expanding to meet growing demand.

David Hochheimer and his wife, Emily Zaas, own the 65-acre Black Rock Orchard in Lineboro, Maryland, on the Pennsylvania border. They have been selling mostly tree fruit–apples, pears, peaches, plums and cherries–as well as seasonal vegetables and greenhouse crops at the Dupont Circle market since it began. They also have stands at six other markets in the area.

“Roughly 95 to 100 percent of my revenue comes from farmers markets,” said Hochheimer, who inherited the farm from his father, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University, who bought it in 1970. “If we didn’t have them, we would be out of business. We would have to do something else.”

Over the years, Hochheimer and Zaas built two greenhouses, enabling them to sell more produce in the spring, and in June they bought a 26-acre farm nearby, which will allow them to increase production.

Another Dupont Circle founding farmer, Mark Toigo, owns the 450-acre Toigo Orchards in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, northwest of Gettysburg. He sells greenhouse vegetables and apples, peaches, pears and other tree fruit at 18 farmers markets in the D.C. area, which account for 75 percent of his sales. He employs 12 to 60 workers, depending on the time of the year. Last week, 25 people were handling the chores.

“I’ve been able to hire more people over the years directly due to access to farmers markets,” he said. “We now produce, transport and market, and we had to buy trucks, tractors and material handling equipment, and hire retail sales folks.”

Toigo grew up in the D.C. area. His father, an electronics engineer, bought a farm, eventually decided to switch careers, and moved the family out of the city. After college, Toigo, who also studied engineering, couldn’t find a job during the early 1980s recession, so he went to work with his dad. After selling directly to restaurants, they started selling at farmers markets, which have been their bread and butter ever since. “If it weren’t for farmers markets, there is no way our farm would have been multigenerational,” he said. “It would have ended. They are that important to us.”

FreshFarm Markets’ growth mirrors the explosion of farmers markets nationwide. Since the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched National Farmers Market Week in 2000, the number of farmers markets has jumped 150 percent, from 2,863 to 7,175. (To find a farmers market near you, go to the USDA’s Farmers Market Searchdatabase.) Currently more than 100,000 farms sell food directly to local consumers, and in 2007, the last year the USDA checked, direct agricultural product sales grossed $1.2 billion.

This dramatic increase in farmers markets has happened with relatively little support from the federal government. Last year, for example, most of the $13.725 billion Congress allocated in commodity, crop insurance, and supplemental disaster assistance payments went to large industrial farms, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The amount that went to support small family farms? According to USDA data, less than $100 million.

Granted, that money does help. Eli Cook, the owner of Spring Valley Farm and Orchard outside of Romney, West Virginia, was able to buy a 52-acre farm with the help of a low-interest USDA loan for young farmers. He was only 22, and had just graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in agricultural business, but he had been selling vegetables at farmers markets since he was 12. He’s now 31, and over the last nine years he purchased adjoining land to expand his spread to 230 acres, on which he grows tomatoes, peaches, apples, strawberries, cantaloupe, potatoes, broccoli and other produce. Another USDA loan covered 85 percent of the cost of erecting an 8-foot high fence to keep deer out.

Cook currently employs five full-time farm hands, 20 seasonal workers for harvesting, and more than 40 part-time high school and college students who sell his produce at six farmers markets, including the FreshFarm Market at Dupont Circle, and a roadside stand at his farm. About 85 percent of his revenue comes from farmers markets. “Farmers markets is where it started and where it’s at right now,” he said. “Farmers markets can eat up everything that we can grow.”

Likewise, Zachariah Lester and his wife, Georgia O’Neal, were able to buy 50 acres of farmland in Unionville, Virginia, two years ago with the help of a low-interest USDA loan. Previously, they had been leasing land. They also got a USDA loan to restore a barn, buy tractors and tillage equipment, and install passive solar greenhouse-like structures, called high tunnels, so they could grow greens, roots and tomatoes all year long.

“We needed USDA help,” said Lester, whose Tree and Leaf Farm is located about 80 miles south of Washington. He and his wife also need farmers markets. Dupont Circle and a market in Falls Church, Virginia, “are vital to our operation,” he said. “About 85 percent of our sales are at both markets. We would not survive without them. We have extremely dedicated customers.”

Jeffrey O’Hara, an agricultural economist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), acknowledges the importance of USDA loan programs to small family farms and is enthusiastic about the agency’s “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program promoting local farming, but he says the federal government should be doing a lot more to support local farmers–especially with unemployment running so high. “If the government diverted just a small amount of the massive subsidies it lavishes on industrial agriculture to support farmers markets and small local farmers,” he said, “it would not only improve American diets, it would generate tens of thousands of new jobs.”

Last summer, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asked Congress to set a goal in the 2012 Farm Bill of helping at least 100,000 Americans to become farmers by, among other things, providing entrepreneurial training and support for farmers markets. Just last week, UCS released a report by O’Hara that takes up Vilsack’s challenge and argues that supporting local and regional food system expansion is central to meeting that goal.

O’Hara’s report, “Market Forces: Creating Jobs through Public Investment in Local and Regional Food Systems,” identifies a number of ways the federal government could encourage new farmers and the growth of farmers markets in the upcoming Farm Bill.

First, Congress should support the development of farmers markets and farm-to-school programs, which can create permanent jobs. For example, O’Hara calculated that the Farmers Market Promotion Program, if reauthorized, could generate as many as 13,500 jobs nationally over a five-year period by providing modest funding for 100 to 500 farmers markets annually.

Second, Congress should level the playing field for small family farms in rural areas by supporting investment in infrastructure, such as meat-processing or dairy-bottling facilities, which would help them produce and market their products to consumers more efficiently. Those investments would foster competition, provide more choices for consumers, and create jobs in rural areas that have been hit hard by the recession.

Finally, federal and state governments should allow farmers markets to accept food nutrition subsidies to enable low-income Americans to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables. Currently, only about 12 percent of the farmers markets across the country have the capability of accepting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on site.

“The farmers supplying these local markets are innovative entrepreneurs, and we should nurture them,” said O’Hara. “Supporting them should be a national priority.”

Originally published on Huffington Post