There is a lot of talk these days about the need for more new entrants willing to fill in when older farmers retire (the average age of farmers in this country is 57 years old). But there has not been much discussion about rebuilding the support system, from infrastructure to community, that will keep those young farmers on the land.

The Hudson Valley Seed Library is an example of an effort that does both of these things–building community by supporting member-growers, employing local artists who design their seed packages, and holding events–like an art opening for this year’s “Art Pack” designs taking place at the Horticultural Society of New York this Thursday evening (more info below)–as well as providing a service to local growers: regionally adapted seeds. I spoke to Ken Greene this week about their work.

Could you tell me a bit about the Hudson Valley Seed Library? What does a seed library do?

One of the great things about seed libraries is that they are diverse as seeds. Every seed library does things differently. The Hudson Valley Seed Library is one of the few farm-based seed libraries. We grow many of the seeds in our catalog on our farm. Members can join, check out, and return saved seeds online. We also have a full catalog of heirloom and open-pollinated varieties that anyone can order seeds from.

Why are regionally adapted seeds so important?

As the seed industry has been heavily consolidated by large (mostly biotech) corporations, seed growing has moved to narrow areas, mostly California and Oregon. Seed growing is seed breeding. Seeds grown in California become more adapted to the specific conditions of where they are grown. This means that we lose much of the diversity, including resistance to certain climate related diseases and regional pests. Regional seeds are better adapted to the area where they will be grown and retain both the genetic, and cultural characteristics that make them unique.

What grew especially well this year? Are their seeds you are offering in your new catalog that are particularly exciting to you?

This was our best seed growing season to date! We grew over 60 varieties on two acres. Everything from the increasingly familiar heirloom tomatoes, to the unusual, like sesame and cotton. Our new fave for the January catalog is Doe Hill peppers–hearty, prolific, delicious, and damn adorable peppers that look like miniature pumpkins.

What advice do you have for food system entrepreneurs and other young farmers?

Be brave and be smart. It’s a bold and brave move to choose to become a farmer. There is risk involved. It’s hard work and it’s tough to make a living. You need to be brave enough to make the leap. At the same time there are ways to set yourself up for success. Don’t go it alone. Reach out to other farmers and farm organizations. If you don’t have land, get creative. If you’re working someone else’s land, get it in writing. Get to know your local resources. (The Greenhorns are a great place to start.) Work on a business plan and learn basic business strategies.

How we made it happen: we pooled our resources with a group of friends in order to buy land. We own the land cooperatively. Not everyone here farms, but everyone cares for and enjoys the property in their own way. We started the business by working with a local organization called the Hudson Valley Agribusiness Development Corporation. They hired a consultant to help us write a professional business plan. With that plan in place we were able to get a Beginning Farmer Loan from Farm Start. It’s been more work than we ever imagined, but there is nothing else we can imagine doing!

Agriculture is cultural. We’ve lost more than local food with the mass transition from small diversified farms to industrial monocrop food systems. We have lost a sense of food culture. Part of the idea of the Seed Library is to help build strong local food systems that are sustainable because all the pieces, from seed to seed, come from our community. This means including not just farmers, but everyone who helps make it happen.

Artists play a vital role in the creation of community. We chose artwork over photographs for our seed packs because we feel that the artwork communicates what is important about seeds–that they come with stories. Saving seeds is about celebrating both the genetic and cultural diversity of the plants that keep us alive.

Please join the Hudson Valley Seed Library for Contemporary Heirlooms at the Horticultural Society of New York (148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor) for a preview party tomorrow night at 5:30pm (tickets can be purchased online here, or call (212) 757-0915). The preview includes local fare catering by Great Performances and drinks provided by Tuthilltown Spirits, an early chance to purchase limited edition fine art prints of the original artworks, gift baskets, and art packs, as well as a guided tour with Ken Greene. The general opening, which is free, will start at 6:30.

If you can’t make the event, you can still support these young farmer-entrepreneurs by purchasing holiday gifts from their catalog.

Photos: From the top, seeds in storage; Doug Muller and Ken Greene of the Hudson Valley Seed Library; the 2011 seed packs.

As droughts threaten the wheat harvest in Russia, resulting in a ban on exports there this year that is driving up prices abroad, something entirely different now threatens one of the world’s most extensive collection of fruits and berries at the Pavlovsk Experimental Station, a seed bank 19 miles southeast of St. Petersburg: development.

Perhaps one of the oldest in the world, the seed bank was started 84 years ago by Nikolai Vavilov, who died of starvation in one of Joseph Stalin’s labor camps in 1943. His seed bank was famously guarded by 12 scientists who eventually starved to death during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad, despite the fact that they were surrounded by edible seeds. Now, a court will decide on Wednesday if the “priceless” collection of 4,000 varieties from all over the world–which includes 1,000 types of strawberries, and 100 varieties each of raspberries, gooseberries and cherries–will be handed over to the Russian Housing Development Foundation to be cleared for housing.

Unlike the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, which maintains an immense dormant seed collection, Pavlovsk Experimental Station is an field seed bank, which means that all of the seeds must be regularly planted and saved. Currently, tens of thousands of plants are in the ground, and scientists argue that it would take years to move without the risk of losing varieties.

The erratic weather in Russia, as well as in much of the rest of the world, should be a wake up call reminding us why seed banks are so important: they give scientists the genetic material with which to develop varieties that can thrive in our planet’s changing climate. Ninety percent of the varieties in the Pavlovsk collection are unique–meaning that if its soil were turned under there, thousands of varieties of fruits and berries would be lost to the world.

A campaign is underway to bring attention to the potential loss. Dr. Cary Fowler, director of The Global Crop Diversity Trust, a Rome, Italy-based organization that has focused in on the seed bank’s plight, had this to say to the BBC:

No country is self-reliant, in terms of having the diversity it needs now and certainly will need in the future, for breeding a variety of crops…

Breeding is an ongoing activity because pests and diseases are always evolving and the climate is changing. We’re always trying to make more productive, drought-tolerant and heat-resistant crops.

This is the raw material for doing all of that – particularly with the changing climate. The biological resources conserved in one country could be very valuable to another country, another continent.

We’re all interdependent and that’s why this unfolding tragedy at Pavlovsk is a concern to people outside Russia as well.

Other scientists have chimed in in agreement. From the Independent UK:

Norman Looney, president of the International Society for Horticultural Science, based in Leuven, Belgium, agreed the collection was unique. He said that with world food production likely to move north as a result of climate change, “these genetic resources will become even more important”.

Jim Hancock of Michigan State University, one of the world’s leading strawberry breeders, said the collection housed many Russian varieties that were exceptionally hardy and disease-resistant. “It would be a major tragedy if the collection were lost,” he said.

In December 2009, one-fifth of the seed bank’s land was given to the Russian Housing Development Foundation. Scientists at the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, which oversees the Pavlovsk Experimental Station, appealed the decision but lost, leading some to speculate about how the collection might be moved. But it would be a huge undertaking. Funding would have to come philanthropically, since seed banks are not by their nature commercial enterprises. Also, the seeds, most of which cannot be saved by drying or freezing, would have to be expedited through quarantine programs should they need to cross the border to get to other institutions. “There are so many technical hurdles to overcome to rescue that collection quickly that I’m afraid we’re going to be standing at the gate, watching extinction take place before our very eyes,” Fowler told the BBC.

Fowler, in a recent piece on The Huffington Post, requested that individuals to send the following Tweets to the Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, who recently joined Twitter:

@KremlinRussia_E Mr. President, protect the future of food – save #Pavlovsk Station! http://huff.to/pavlsk

Or, if you feel like it, try it in Russian:

@KremlinRussia Господин президент, защитите будущее сельского хозяйства – спасите Павловскую станцию! http://huff.to/pavlsk

You can also write a letter to the Kremlin here.

The Kremlin has yet to respond to outside entreaties to save the seed bank.

Governments from 175 nations are gathered in Doha, Qatar this week to discuss the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). High up on the agenda is a potential trade ban on bluefin tuna, supported by both the US and Europe, which would allow time for the species to recover before it can be traded again. Japan, where bluefin is a delicacy and where 80% of the fish is consumed, is strongly opposed to the move — despite convincing scientific evidence that the species is nearing collapse.

According to Charles Clover, journalist and author of the book The End of the Line, the Japanese press has arrived in Doha en masse, and “have been placing stories saying that the attempt to ban international trade in the bluefin is an attack on the Japanese custom of eating fish.” Yesterday’s report from Clover indicated that an Appendix II listing for bluefin is in discussion, which he says would equal “business as usual.” The film version of The End of the Line (reviewed here on Civil Eats) gave photographic evidence of the shady deals surrounding bluefin, including the fact that the Japanese company Mitsubishi is currently stockpiling the fish and now controls 60% of the trade.

While the bluefin has become a hot topic due to its sought after flesh, many endangered species get regularly ignored — even though we are currently seeing a “sixth great extinction” — one of the largest losses of biodiversity since the disappearance of the dinosaurs, according to Harvard biologist and two-time Pulizer prize-winner E. O. Wilson. Unlike the species we eat, most people don’t see how the loss of an insect in a random region in the Amazon, for example, could affect our day-to-day lives. However, a similar loss to the one at the time of the dinosaur extinction, according to Wilson, would take the earth 5-10 million years from which to recover — a period in which plants or insects could become the new dominant species, overtaking mammals.

Wilson cites biodiversity loss as directly related to the increase in human population, and thus our consumption. In his book, The Diversity of Life, he writes:

The prospects for biodiversity can be summarized by the following imagery of the bottleneck. The world’s human population will increase by about a third before peaking within a century or so, then commence a slow decline. If the number at maximum is not greater than 8 billion, everyone can, in theory at least, be housed and fed. However, the already intense pressures on the last remnants of wild biodiversity might easy grow fatal for a majority of remaining ecosystems and their distressed species of plants and animals. The only way to carry biodiversity safely through the bottleneck of this critical period is by a combination of scientific and technological innovation, abatement of population growth, and environmental education, guided by a redirection of moral purpose.

Stronger regulation wouldn’t hurt either.

Just to get a greater sense of the kind of havoc the human animal (we are, after all, a species among those in the kingdom animalia) is wreaking, take for example the ecosystem on which we most rely for our very sustenance: the soil. Insects, protozoa, bacteria, nematodes, worms, fungi and others, representing nearly one million different recognized species, call the earth’s crust home and have been relied upon for centuries to help make the soil fertile. (This is why the dung beetle, aka scarab, pictured above, was so revered in ancient Egypt.) These species’ work is unquantifiable, and we have yet to understand their full significance, nor do we even know the breadth of different species living there. Yet unfortunately, intensive agriculture continues to call for millions of pounds of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and deep tilling, resulting in a destroyed ecosystem: dead soil. Furthermore, the favoring of a handful of plant species is at the expense of the other 250,000 known plant species, and the thousand of species of animals whose habitats are destroyed when new mono-cropped fields are plowed.

George Monbiot, writing yesterday in the Guardian, had this to say about loss of species due to intensive farming:

The rightwing thinktanks that demand a further intensification of farming argue, as they always do these days, that their real concern is not the welfare of the rich (the businesses and bosses who pay them to develop these arguments) but the welfare of the poor. If we were to farm with wildlife rather than only profit in mind, the decline in productivity would raise the price of food, at an intolerable cost to the poor.

There is some truth in this, as far as it goes. But I have never heard these people argue on the same grounds against unregulated urban sprawl, which every year takes millions of acres of good farmland permanently out of production. Far from it: they demand the scrapping of planning rules. Nor do I see them making the case for reducing the rich world’s consumption of meat, to release grain for feeding humans. The immediate choice we have to make is not between biodiversity and feeding the world, but between biodiversity and blithering stupidity.

Monbiot is right (though I disagree with the idea that a decline in productivity would be the end result of a change in farming practices). However, he is missing the point here: we don’t have a choice, in the face of mass extinction, but to farm with nature. Modern farming is the primary way that we are putting hundreds of thousands of species at risk everyday, and its destructive techniques are at the root of the “sixth great extinction.”

In The End of the Line, one of the scientists interviewed says that we have just gotten too good at catching fish with technologies like sonar and modern fishing equipment. The Europeans recognized this too, when they made their support for a ban on bluefin conditional on leaving out “artisanal” fisherman in “small boats.” I’d say its time we start talking about “artisanal” farming, too — on small farms: farming that serves to protect biodiversity, and thus our future on this planet.

Photo: Dung beetle building a ball of elephant dung, spreading the fertility on the land. By Yann Mabille

Norman Borlaug — best known for winning the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his role in the Green Revolution (the transformation of agriculture to an industrial, monocropped system, which increased the amount of food being produced in Mexico, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and elsewhere) — died this past weekend at age 95.

Borlaug’s life was dedicated to ending hunger through technology, and increasing yields was his single-minded aim. Though I do not doubt his sincerity in seeking to prevent famine, what he failed to recognize was that hunger did not persist because of a lack of food. That in fact, the root of hunger issues in the world have had more to do with a lack of equal food distribution. (As the BBC recently reported, elimination of food waste alone in the UK and the US could lift 1 billion people out of hunger if that food were instead better distributed.) Technology brings with it both bad and good; and in fact, climate change could be the worst end result of our dalliance with it. But in believing that somehow technology will only perfect us, we’ve stayed in denial about the potential for technology to also destroy us, whether quick (think atomic bomb) or more subtle — through the destruction over time of our soil.

Indeed, yields did increase early on through the Green Revolution’s efficiencies and the introduction of irrigation and imported nitrogen to the soil. These short-term gains were intoxicating. But in the long term, yields have leveled off and crops have fallen prey to nature’s barriers: superweeds, lowering water tables, availability of oil for transport, climate change, etc.

The truth is, we now know that the Green Revolution, like our own American industrial agriculture system, is unsustainable: it is entirely dependent on oil, reliant on excessive amounts of water, and requires the products of a handful of corporations. Sustainable agriculture is the only way forward that deals with these issues, and a ‘Sustainable Green Revolution’ will necessarily involve putting away silver bullet thinking and instead empowering smallholders in whatever ways work best for their particular region.

While the Obama administration considers forging another Green Revolution, this time in Africa — where USAID has been funding agricultural biotechnology since 1991 — I felt that it might be valuable to review some of the legacies of the Green Revolution point by point.

The Green Revolution has:

• Undermined biodiversity. Chemical-intensive agriculture has wreaked havoc on the life in the soil — killing off the earthworms and other organisms that play a vital role in agriculture. It has also marginalized species of animals by destroying their habitat and poisoning their food and water. Furthermore, in the quest for one species of plant at the expense of all others, diverse sources of food have also been eliminated from local diets.

• Created a less nutritious diet. Big Ag claims they seek to ‘feed the world,’ but what are they feeding the world, in fact? Destroying many of the varied plants we have historically eaten means local populations (like Americans do now, too) come to rely intensively on just a few grain crops for food. Western afflictions — diabetes, heart disease, obesity — are now also prevalent in these populations.

• Exacerbated climate change. Agriculture has the potential to store carbon in the soil in the roots of cover crops and managed grasslands. Yet industrial agriculture continues to undermine anything beyond the yearly planting cycle through invasive tilling, and when using ‘no-till’ methods, requires the pouring of chemicals over the land that exclude all other species. In addition, more energy is now burned up to produce much of the world’s food than is achieved by eating it.

• Increased inequity. The Green Revolution didn’t spread the wealth accrued through monocropping. In fact many corporations have profited from agricultural speculation in the billion of dollars — meaning they have specifically profited on the risks that exacerbated hunger.

• Functioned as a modern form of colonialism. Local, effective alternatives to the Green Revolution’s imposed technologies are being ignored in favor of corporate solutions that change the self-sufficiency and power structure in those countries.

The Green Revolution is not a long-term solution to the problem of hunger. The elephant in the room, of course, is population. Borlaug saw that we could not continue to feed a growing population — whether he recognized it as a resource availability issue or not.

The book, A Nation of Farmers by Aaron Newton and Sharon Astyk had this to say about the Green Revolution:

There is, in truth, no way to be certain what we gained and what we lost in the Green Revolution. What is virtually certain is that its gains were overstated and that allocation of resources, whether from future generations or from poor to rich, were inequitable. When someone makes the statement that grain yields rose by so much, it looks impressive. But the practical realities of that are very different. We have to ask whether those yield increases actually made it from fields into the mouths of the hungry and whether it was possible to duplicate them through any other method.

The bottom line is that we often think of our wealth as a product of our ingenuity, education and technology, when it is more specifically the result of the exploitation of other countries labor and resources. Borlaug’s Green Revolution neglected these social aspects of the need to feed the hungry. The question is, will we ever re-evaluate the underlying principles we espouse for accruing wealth in order to create a truly equitable and just world? If not, we will never solve the problems those principles create.

Oil is history, and food as it is currently produced and eaten is going the way of the dinosaurs, too. So what are our real options for producing food to feed our population? A great one hour film called A Farm for the Future from the BBC seeks to answer this very question by investigating some of the methods for making real sustainable changes to a livestock farm in Devon, England belonging to the narrator of the film, Rebecca Hosking. There are no easy answers, but she discovers one root of unsustainability on farms is the energy we put into working against nature. While speaking to permaculture expert Patrick Whitefield, she asks if what he is proposing is “to design the energy out, or design the labor out” of the system. To which he replies yes, on both counts.

Hosking visits a number of experts who have developed systems — like for example, the livestock farmer that has stopped tilling the land every year, and produces grass made up of twenty or so varieties with dense root systems, such that the cows can remain outdoors year round without destroying the pasture. Otherwise, the narrator says, tractors must produce the bails of hay that are then brought to the animals indoors. Tilling also brings up the valuable living soil, exposing earth worms and other creatures to the elements and to predators like birds. Eventually the land is drained of its life, and must be showered with fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, because there are no longer any natural defenses left to protect the crops.

Those natural defenses are the outcome of biodiversity, which some current legislation in the United States could require farms to do away with in a misguided measure for food safety. Living soil breaks down waste and produces fertility, having flowers that invite pollinators encourages better yields, bird life means natural sources of phosphate (instead of mining it for fertilizers that then get washed away). This is working with nature, and requires less energy to produce more.

The film features small-holder permaculture farms where diversity of plants, animals and insects in mixed wooded and open land, resulting in low energy and low maintenance abundance — up to five times more food than can be produced in open fields under current methods. One such grower estimated that you could feed ten people on an acre in such a permaculture system. The one catch, you cannot grow the amount of cereals that we consume this way. This could prove the hardest sell: a diet made up of a lot less grain.

Unfortunately in the U.S., permaculture is not often discussed. Systems like these are also never studied to compare with our current chemical and oil-intensive systems of growing food, so as to see a real comparison. This is because Big Ag is paying for most of the studies performed by researchers, and therefore they are skewed towards developing new technologies. Also, we would need a million new farmers in short order to begin to change the system, and to get there, we’d need to admit that the system we have no is not working and put legislation in place to help small farmers thrive.

Unfortunately, if we don’t begin to try out alternatives now, it could be too late when the oil runs out and we are forced to find out what works through trial and error.  I highly suggest taking a look at this program, A Farm for the Future, as it gives insight into improving the methodologies behind farming that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

H/T to Rob Smart
Photo: The BBC