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.

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)

When he was seven years old, Malik Yakini, inspired by his grandfather, planted his own backyard garden in Detroit, seeding it with carrots and other vegetables. Should it come as any surprise that today, Yakini has made urban farming his vocation? The Executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), which he co-founded in 2006, he is also chair of the Detroit Food Policy Council, which advocates for a sustainable, localized food system and a food-secure Detroit.

It’s well known that Detroit has been hard hit by the economic crisis—its unemployment rate is a staggering 28 percent—but it also has one of the most well-developed urban agriculture scenes in the country. Over the past decade, resourceful Detroiters and organizations such as DBCFSN have been converting the city’s vacant lots and fallow land into lush farms and community gardens. According to the Greening of Detroit, there are now over 1,351 gardens in the city.

I spoke to Yakini, one of the leaders of Detroit’s vibrant food justice movement, about  the problem with the term “food desert,” how Detroit vegans survive the winter, and what the DBCFSN is doing to change the food landscape in Detroit. “We’re really making an effort to reach beyond the foodies—to get to the common folk who are not really involved in food system reform,” says Yakini.

Tell me about the origins of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.

It grew out of some earlier work. I was principal of an African-centered charter school in the Detroit area called Nsoroma Institute Public School Academy. In 2000 we started doing organic gardening on a serious level and developed a food security curriculum. That initial garden evolved into something we called the Shamba Organic Garden Collective, where we had parents and teachers planting gardens in their backyards and in vacant lots next to their houses.

We had a team called the groundbreakers who would go out and till peoples’ gardens for them—because that was the most labor-intensive part. We had about 20 gardens spread out over the city as part of this collective. And as the work continued to grow, we were looking for a way to expand it and involve more people. Informally, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network grew out of this work.

In February of 2006, I called together a group of 40 people who I knew were either gardeners, chefs, raw foodists—people who had some connection to food—for the purposes of starting the DBCFSN.

One of the main activities of the organization is to influence public policy. Is there a political leader in Detroit who has become a powerful advocate for the food justice movement and has helped push through laws that protect community gardeners and promote food security?

The one who has been most supportive has been councilwoman JoAnn Watson. And councilman Kwame Kenyatta has been supportive as well. In fact, it’s through JoAnn Watson that we were able to have the City Council approve the Food Security Policy that our organization wrote. She was able to give us the traction we needed to get the City Council to appoint members of the Detroit Food Policy Council.

What policy goals are the DBCFSN working on right now?

The big issue right now in Detroit is creating ordinances to regulate urban agriculture. There’s a big impediment and that’s a state law called “the Right to Farm Act.” Essentially it says no municipality has the authority to create ordinances that regulate agriculture within their jurisdiction, because of this state law that supersedes it. Just last week there was a bill introduced to the Michigan house to exempt Detroit from the Michigan Right to Farm Act, which was passed in the early 1980s. It was passed to protect rural farmers from suburban sprawl and from complaints from people who were moving into rural areas where farming was taking place, who wanted it to be like a city. So the law was to protect the farmers, but it didn’t anticipate the urban agriculture movement we have now.

At this point, our policy work is primarily done through our involvement in the Detroit Food Policy Council. Our farm manager is a member of the Michigan Food Policy Council. So we are trying to move policy forward through our involvement in those two organizations.

Do you think there’s a chance the Michigan legislature will pass this bill?

It’s a question of building the proper coalition on a statewide level. We have to find a way to get enough Michigan state legislators to vote for that exemption. But that’s challenging because Michigan is a very large agricultural state. In fact, it has the greatest diversity of crops outside of California. But most of what is grown in Michigan, like every other state in the United States, is corn and soybeans. And so these corn and soy farmers are not the natural allies of the sustainable ag folks in Detroit. It’s gonna take some networking across traditional interests in order to build the kind of support politically that we’d need to get an exemption.

Flint and Grand Rapids have very large urban ag movements, too, and they’re handcuffed in the same way. So there are some natural allies out there. But in order to move this thing forward we have to have some allies in rural Michigan—the traditional farmers.

Does that mean that urban farmers in Detroit are technically defying the law right now?

There’s a woman on the Food Policy Council who is an employee of the City Planning Commission. She says there are some things that are illegal and some things that are unlawful. It’s illegal to have farm animals like cows in the city of Detroit—there’s a law prohibiting that. But there are other things like bees that the law doesn’t speak to specifically. So there’s no law that permits it and there’s also not a law that prohibits it. It’s not lawful but it’s not illegal. So we’re kind of caught in this grey area right now.

It’s been estimated that Detroit has about 6,000-10,000 acres that are vacant—that’s about a third of the city. So you have a lot of commercial interests beginning to look at Detroit as a place to do agriculture. Because the city doesn’t have the ability to regulate it right now, we don’t have the ability to say to these large commercial interests that we don’t feel that this scale of agriculture is appropriate for Detroit. Getting the exemption from the Right to Farm Act would allow Detroit to define what is appropriate in terms of scale and in terms of things like composting.

What about policy on the national level. Does the DBCFSN have any position on the farm bill?

Several of us have been involved in webinars and meetings to bring us up to speed on the farm bill. But we haven’t actively taken a position as a group.

We’re more focused on local policy. After studying the farm bill over the last several months, I have a concern about what it takes to build the type of support nationally, across various interests, to get anything passed in the farm bill. It’s much easier to build that level of consensus on a local or state-wide basis.

I think big ag will continue to get billion dollar subsidies. Some of the things that were added in the last farm bill were good: Our organization got a hoop house from the USDA as a result. But when you look at a hoop house that cost $8,000 and maybe there are 5-10 of ‘em in Detroit, that’s $40,000 to $80,000. But then you’re looking at billions of dollars that are going to these folks who are growing corn and soybeans.

So really, if we want to have a major impact on the food system in the United States, the paradigm has to be shifted. So that sustainable agriculture is incentivized and this unsustainable model of industrial farming is dis-incentivized. The best way to do that is through money. Of course, that is a big fight because the food lobby is one of the most powerful lobbies that exists. And I really haven’t heard answer of how you build the level of power, how you galvanize that level of support, on a national level.

The DBCFSN has a “What’s for Dinner?” lecture series.  What speakers have you had and what are they about?

This year we had four lectures. The first was called “Is my garden legal?” by Kathryn Underwood, the woman who is on the Detroit Food Policy Council. She spoke about the laws or lack of laws regulating agriculture in Detroit. The second lecture was a guy named Kilindi Iyi and he’s a mycologist. His was on adding mushrooms to your garden and the technologies of growing mushrooms. The third lecture was the board president of our organization, Ife Kilimanjaro, and it dealt with the global food shortage and how that is a man-made phenomenon how it has been manipulated through these multinational companies that are are controlling much of the food supply.  The final lecture was one I did on the impact of global warming on agriculture.

So this lecture series—as well as some of the other things we do—is geared towards raising public consciousness. Because we realize that it’s not just a question of greater access to food. But people have to have knowledge about the food, and have to have some understanding about why sustainable growing is better than the industrial food system that provides most of the food. They have to have some understanding about food culture. Because much of our traditional food culture has been lost over the past generation, due to the rush towards convenience in the post World War II period, and then the fast food proliferation which occurred in Detroit and other places throughout the country. Our families today rarely sit down and eat a meal that’s prepared from scratch. So there’s a lot of education that has to go on in order to support the growing of fresh produce. And creating markets in which to sell it. We have to increase demand at the same time as we’re increasing access.

Is D-Town Farm the DBCFSN’s only garden? Or do you have others?

We just have one location. We started out initially with two acres and we currently have seven acres—so it’s a pretty large project. We’re trying to stay focused and not have various locations around the city. Frankly we don’t have the capacity to manage that. Even managing the seven acres we have now is challenging!

We consider ourselves to be a model. Rather than trying to start gardens all around the city, what we’re doing is creating a learning institution where people who are interested in doing this work can come and learn various techniques and strategies that they can take back to their neighborhoods. So we see ourselves as a catalyst.

So the produce that’s grown at D-Town Farm—is it sold there at a farm stand or at Eastern Market?

We sell it at Eastern Market and also at a few farmers’ markets. We also sell to a few restaurants. We’re working on a project called “Take it to the Marketplace” that will put some of our products in grocery stores. It’ll be a producers’ co-op that we’ll be part of and we’ll invite other local food entrepreneurs to be part of. But it will sold under the D-Town brand. And we’ll collectively market and promote those products, and collectively distribute those products. So that’s our next move: to have locally grown options available at stores that people normally shop at.

Speaking of grocery stores, you said something interesting at the Community Food Security Coalition conference in Oakland: that implicit in researcher Mari Gallagher’s definition for “food desert” is the notion that grocery stores are the only solution to food deserts. In fact, what she and others including you stress is that multiple solutions are needed—farmers’ markets, food co-ops, urban farms. But don’t Detroit residents—even those who buy their food from D-town Farm—rely on grocery stores in the winter? Even with hoop house technology, you can’t possibly grow enough produce in the winter months for people to be food secure—can you?

Not at all. We don’t even grow enough in the ground in the summer to be self-sufficient. We’re producing a very small amount of the produce consumed in Detroit—probably less than one percent. We are at the embryonic stages. We think we have much greater capacity. But we’re nowhere near that point right now.

People are accustomed to going to grocery stores to buy food and they’re used to these large, pretty pieces of produce. Often, organic food is not as large and sometimes it has flaws. So we have to re-educate people about the aesthetics of food and the nutritional value of food, at the same time as we educate people about the value of eating whole foods.

We’re not self-sufficient even in the summer time—less so in the winter. We are producing food in the winter using hoop house technology, but of course you can only grow limited crops in the winter using hoop houses unless you have some external heating source. People are primarily growing salad greens, collards, kale, and things like that. They clearly aren’t growing peppers, tomatoes, and squash in the winter in hoop houses.

Without a full-service grocery store, where do you find sustainable dairy, meat, or bread? Does Detroit have any meat CSAs?

Because I’m a vegan, I haven’t done a lot of investigation about sources for eating meat and dairy. Although that’s my personal dietary preference, that’s clearly not the dietary preference of the majority of the people in Detroit. So since the majority of people do eat meat, we need to find ways of finding high quality meat at affordable prices. I’m very ignorant about what those options are, but that’s an area I intend to educate myself about in the near future.

But even as a vegan, it must be a challenge to find enough healthy food in Detroit in the winter. Do the locally-run bodegas in town—the “party stores”—have any fresh produce?

Unfortunately, many of us, particularly those of us who are trying to eat organic foods, have to leave the city to find those. I’m privileged enough to have an automobile. [Note: one fifth of all Detroit households are car-less.] I’m able to drive the couple of miles from my house to get to Ferndale, where they have food outlets that sell organic food. They do sell some local produce but of course during the winter that selection is very limited. And so although I am dedicated to eating local foods, I’m not able to do that to the extent that I’d like to during the winter time.

I read an article that asserted that Detroit and Cleveland have plenty of corner stores, many of which sell produce. The USDA overlooks such stores when they designate a neighborhood a food desert. (They define supermarkets as grocery stores with at least $2 million in annual sales.) But don’t these so-called “fringe stores” sell mostly processed food, liquor and cigarettes?

There are small grocery stores in Detroit. Mari Gallagher’s 2007 study said there were something like 1,075 food outlets in the city of Detroit. The vast majority, though, are convenience stores or what we call party stores. The problem is that far too many of them sell food that is of an inferior quality, sometimes at inflated prices. And the sanitary conditions in the stores often leave something to be desired. I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, because there are some very good independently-owned grocery stores in Detroit. A few. So I don’t want to leave the impression that they’re all terrible. Many of them are terrible. But even the decent ones aren’t selling organic produce. And for me, eating organically is very important.

Your friend Malik Shabazz of the Marcus Garvey movement has been videotaping some of the blatant health violations at “party stores” such as rat feces, and is reporting them to the Department of Public Health.

He’s also finding meats that have another label placed over the expiration label. He’s finding stores that are selling alcohol to minors. He’s documenting all of these things. His organization creates the kind of pressure and public scrutiny that’s needed to close down drug houses, too. It’s part of an overall effort to create a higher quality of life in Detroit’s African American community.

In Oakland, you cautioned that racism is prevalent in the food movement—that some white food activists will come into an African American community and tell them what to do. Can you give an example of a white food justice organization in Detroit who is a good ally of the DBCFSN, who works with you in a collaborative way?

The main ally we have is Earthworks Urban Farm. The manger there is Patrick Crouch. We do quite a few things together including participating in the “Undoing Racism in the Detroit Food System” initiative. They are probably our best predominantly white allies.

One of the goals of the DBCFSN is to promote healthy eating habits amongst Detroit’s youth. Any tips on how to do this?  Kids can be tough critics.

When children are involved in growing food, they feel a sense of ownership. Like, “I grew that carrot, I planted those seeds.” That’s a big incentive right there. But also just bringing in fresh greens and having the kids taste them. Typically they enjoy it—they like it.

We have a youth program called Food Warriors youth development program that functions at Nsoroma. Also, there is a food security curriculum that’s woven into the fabric of the school.  Every teacher has to have one lesson per week that has a food security tie-in. We look at food security in a very broad sense, not just in terms of providing access to food but we look at all aspects of the food system. With some of the younger children, rather than inundate them with a lot of theory, their food security lessons are more hands on. Preparing things, tasting them. Exposing them to foods that they don’t normally eat.

Healthy eating is part of the culture at the school—and it has been for some time. Gum, candy, and soda pop are not allowed in the building at all—either by students, staff, or parents. That’s been a long-standing policy. There’s a catering company that provides lunch every day. So we have whole grains—no white rice is served—it’s always brown rice. There’s no red meat served. And so we’ve created a cultural environment that is supportive of healthy eating. So the Food Warriors are building on a culture that already exists in the school.

What about public schools in Detroit? Are there people putting pressure on them to improve their food?

The food service director of Detroit Public Schools, Betti Wiggins, is very progressive. She was recently elected to the Detroit Food Policy Council and she’s very active in the food movement. She has reached out to local growers. Of course she’s working for a bureaucracy that slows down what she’d like to do. But there couldn’t be a better person in place pushing for this to happen.

She is involved in the farm-to-school movement and has piloted that in several schools in Detroit, and has encouraged several schools to start gardens. So she is a very strong ally in this movement.

What do you think of entrepreneur John Hantz, and this ambitious plan he has to create “the largest urban farm” in Detroit?

That is the inevitable question. All interviews lead to that question.

I find it to be problematic for several reasons. The first reason is because the city is 77 percent African American (according to the latest Census Data), and the key players in the Hantz project are white men. That’s problematic.

Secondly, they are not committed to organic agriculture. They propose some type of mixture of the traditional industrial farming model and sustainable techniques.

Thirdly—and most alarmingly—they don’t have any sense of using urban agriculture to empower communities. They are driven by the profit motive. The current urban ag movement is clearly steeped within the social justice movement and clearly is trying to empower people, communities, and community organizations. And none of that is on the radar of the Hantz project. So that is very troubling.

Although Mr. Hantz is proposing this very large farm, what a lot of people don’t know is that he’s proposing that only ten percent of what he grows is produce. The rest is Christmas trees! Most people think he’s going to have thousands of acres of tomatoes and peppers and lettuce, but that’s not the case.

Mr. Hantz has also said that really what he’s trying to do is create scarcity, thereby driving up the value of the land. At a public forum, someone said to him, “Well that sounds like a land grab.” And he said, “Yes, it is a land grab.” That’s another problem. There are major questions around use and ownership of land. And how land serves the common good as opposed as trying to serve the interests of wealthy individuals who are trying to make a profit.

Has he reached out to the black community in Detroit in any way?

After much criticism, there has been some reaching out to community members. But it seems to be an afterthought, after he received so much criticism. He’s also made overtures to me. I’ve been involved in a couple discussions about trying to sit down with him to understand more fully what he wants to do.

I have a good relationship with Mike Score, who is the president of Hantz Farms. Mike is the person who is leading the farm effort right now. He’s a legitimate farmer and an honorable human being with a very high level integrity. He and I have talked about trying to set up a meeting with Mr. Hantz and some of the key people in the urban ag movement. But Hantz has been resistant to meeting with a group of people.

You were awarded a two-year fellowship with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Do you mind my asking how you’re spending the $35,000 stipend? What project or projects are you working on?

I proposed a project called Be Black & Green. What I’m doing is video documentation of black farmers, gardeners, and food activists throughout the country. I just posted an interview with David Hilliard (of the Black Panthers) that I shot in  Oakland, and I have five others in the can that I’ll be posting soon. What I’m doing is creating a network of black farmers, gardeners and food activists so they can know each other. I’m also raising the profile of black farmers, gardeners, and food activists in the larger food movement.

We want to assert that black people have always been involved in agriculture in this country and we’ve always been involved in sustainable agriculture. And that we have as much claim to this movement as anybody else does. And so by telling these stories and really allowing others to tell their own stories, and raising the profile of of black people doing this work, I hope to help people understand the role that we play in this movement historically.

It’s out of the bag: kale is your favorite food.  What’s your preferred way of preparing it?

Raw kale salad. I’m just addicted to it. I serve it with a special dressing: toasted sesame seed oil, nutritional yeast, cayenne pepper—those are three of the main ingredients. I can’t tell you the rest of the ingredients, but I can say that people really seem to like it.

What’s your definition of food justice?

Food justice is people being treated justly by all of the venues that they interact with to obtain food. The other part of food justice has to do with economic justice: that when people spend money on food, they need to derive some benefits from the money that they spend beside just trading food for money.

The money that they spend on food needs to enrich their community. In too many cases, we have wealth extraction strategies—where people spend money in their communities on food and money is taken out of their communities and creates jobs and wealth in other communities. So part of food justice is circulating the money that people spend on food in their community for their own benefit. It also has to do with simple things like people being spoken to respectfully at the places that they go to purchase food, with their human dignity being upheld. Having equal access to good food sources—that’s a big part of food justice. So I would say, the access piece is key, upholding peoples‘ dignity is key, and the economic justice part of it is key.

Originally published on The Faster Times

In December of 2010, I bought the farm.

Clearly I mean this in the literal, not euphemistic, sense. (Although I’ve spent some time pondering why the phrase “bought the farm” means “to die,” but I digress.)

According to the legal survey, my farm is “12 acres, more or less,” meaning the surveyor measured off 12.006 acres and called it good. It has a cute farmhouse that I love living in, six strong outbuildings, a grove of trees on the north and west sides, and 4.6 acres of ground formerly planted in a corn-soybean rotation that now has grass seeds sprouting in it.

I live in northeast Nebraska, where a “farm” is usually much bigger than 12 acres, and a “farmer” is typically a 59-year-old white man who grows corn and soybeans and/or raises cattle for a living. Folks around here would call my place “an acreage.” But I aim to grow enough food to feed myself and others in my community. Isn’t that what a farm does? I’m calling it a farm, even if there are those who would object.

Buying this farm is a plateau in a pursuit that started for me as a wide-eyed college student reading My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It dawned on me that the most rebellious, independent act I could commit against an unjust social and economic system would be to grow my own food. I was pretty into rebellion then, but even as I’ve aged the idea doesn’t lose its shine.

Luckily I met a partner who didn’t think growing things was a crazy idea, and soon we were causally farm shopping. We were pretty picky–we wanted a sturdy house and barn, 10-20 acres, nice land with a grove of trees and a commuting distance of no more than 5 miles to work.  I really wanted hardwood floors, but I think I would have settled if everything else fell into place.

We made offers on a few places, all the while friends and neighbors told us about a perfect place exactly 5 miles from our office. The first time I saw it, I fell in love. I held it up as the gold standard to every other house we looked at, even though it wasn’t on the market because the son of the owner wouldn’t sell “until Dad died.” I wasn’t going to hope for that, so we kept looking.

When our banker called to say that the owner of “that perfect place” had passed on at age 97, I could only hope that his son listed the house at a price we could afford and with enough acres to satisfy us. He did, and so in the dead of the worst winter in 30 years (according to my neighbors, but we’ll see what they say next year), we moved to the country.

The legacy of those previous owners lives in the apple trees, raspberry bushes, rhubarb patch, daffodils, and grape hyacinth that my partner and I now enjoy–as well as the surprises that keep popping out of the ground even 18 months later.

We’re now finishing up our second season in the garden, and it’s been delicious. The peas, onions, kale, and broccoli have taught us about storage, moths, and frost. Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants that got their start as seedlings in a room upstairs with a big south-facing window have helped us experiment with pressure canning, low tunnels, and mulch.

We’ve also planted 350 tree seedlings we ordered from our local Natural Resource District. Deciding which trees to order took a long time–we took stock of what we have in our grove and what we lack, what purpose we want the tree or bush to serve, and how much room we have. In the end, we got lilacs and dogwoods for a hedge to protect the garden from road dust and pesticide drift, red cedars for a living snow fence, Colorado blue spruce to fill in the shady gaps, and cottonwood and honey locust for firewood.

The red cedars and dogwoods came to us looking robust, while the blue spruce and honey locusts were hardly more than twigs. Fingers crossed that most of them make it, despite my tripping over them in the dark on the way to the chicken coop.

I’ve already learned a lot about owning a farm in the few months I’ve been here, like how to drive our 1960s Farmall 460 tractor and what the proper distance is to stand from a chain saw operated by someone else. (Answer: if there’s sawdust in my eyes, I’m too close.) I’ve found that grain bins look an awful lot like space capsules on the inside, and that baby chicks are only adorably cute for the first week.

We have laying hens that give us a rainbow of eggs most days, about 10 or 11 different breeds. This spring they got sick, and we had to learn how to make the tough choice to cull when nothing we did helped them recover. Our Katahdin sheep have so far given us lambs as well as laughs, and a few lessons in midwifery along the way too.

We’ve been busy.

I have big plans for this farm, though they’ve been tempered by a dose of reality: A full time job makes part-time farming hard to balance. But I’ve gotten to the point where I believe I’m at least a part-time farmer, and my home needed a name.

Welcome to Thistle Root Farm!

Originally published on Grist

*Editor’s Note: Title change from “Kansas” to “Nebraska.”

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

One example is Focus Agriculture, put on by the Agri-Culture organization, a non-profit offshoot of the Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau. This unique “first-in-the-nation” educational program targets business professionals and community leaders, providing a thorough and in-depth look at the multi-faceted arena that is agriculture.

Agri-Culture strives to bridge the divide between rural and urban areas, recognizing that most policy about our farmland happens in cities, away from the people and places that should have the most input about those environmental decisions. The Farm Bureau noticed that most of the decision makers with agriculture didn’t actually have a thorough understanding of the industry. To address the abstract nature of this issue, the Focus Agriculture program was developed in 1989 and is now in its 22nd year.

Each year, a handful of applicants out of a large pool are selected to participate in the class. If chosen, they receive a grant of $1,500 towards the $2,000 tuition and if they achieve perfect attendance during the nine, daylong sessions, $100 is refunded. This must be one of the cheapest educational deals around (the math would be $44 per session) considering the scope of information that is acquired over the course of almost a year.

Over nine months, direct hands-on learning coupled with lectures and seminars are offered on a wide range of topics. Farm tours, Production and Labor, Ethnic Groups in Agriculture, Environment and Technology, Government Relations and Politics, Regional Diversity of Commodities Produced and Marketing and Foreign Competition are some of the themes addressed during the year. Agri-Culture’s Celeste Din says that much of the curriculum stays the same from year to year, and many of the presenters and participating community organizations have been a part of the program since the beginning. However, due to the ever-changing nature of environmental issues and contemporary food policy, the program works at maintaining relevant content to today’s world.

The 21 participants of the 2011 class illustrate the diverse audience this program serves. A bank manager, a photography teacher, a senior finance analyst, a county planning director, mixed in with someone from CCOF and the Land Trust. In the past, they have had state senators, mayors and various politicians mixed in as well. Agri-Culture’s Board of Directors purposefully chooses applicants to create a varied class, one or two people that are directly involved in agriculture, but the rest to represent parts of the public that don’t know that much about the industry. It seems like a great opportunity for sharing ideas and learning from each other’s contrasting experiences and professions.

John Fisher, Program Director of the Life Lab Science Program, is a graduate of the 2001 Focus Ag class. That year, he went to a lumber mill, an abalone farm, UCSC’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, Driscoll Berry Farm, a packing plant for paper and containers, Quail Mountain Herbs, a rose breeding company, a small organic apple farm and heard from a variety of winemakers. He also shadowed the owner of a gigantic strawberry farm for the one-on-one portion of the program, kind of like a ride-along in the world of agriculture. “When I walked in there were like six people on the phone in this office striking berry deals, just like being a trader but their commodity was strawberries. It was cutthroat, total wheeling and dealing,” he remembered in fascination.

Here in Santa Cruz County, we are used to seeing an abundance of small, organic farms. The waiting list to get into a farmer’s market is literally years long, and you can basically throw a rock in any direction and hit a farmer of some sort no matter where you happen to be. But the South County is less transparent, ironic since it represents the “salad bowl” of the world. The strawberries grown in this region are shipped around the globe, a multi-million dollar industry that hardly equates with the typical identity of a Santa Cruz “farm.” But the fact that this gigantic diversity of scale exists here is exactly what Focus Ag is all about. The program truly presents every model, discussing the bigger economies of agriculture in a way that many of the participants would have never comprehended before.

And so it might be challenging for a hardcore environmentalist to sit through a lecture from the Agriculture Commissioner discussing the importance of pesticides in our county, it would at the same time be an opportunity to really hear from the other side and know what goes through the minds of those farmers who might be breeding plants on a molecular level instead of hand-digging a trench for heirloom potatoes.

John recalls visiting the berry grower Driscoll and seeing teams of geneticists conducting plant tissue cultures, more a science lab than a farm. But now he knows even more about what is actually going on here. “Focus Ag always showed two sides of every controversial issue. They brought in really conservative organizations along with experts in sustainability. This let us understand the challenges of running an ag business and we learned about the big issues that agriculture faces,” he said.

I buy local and organic food as much as possible, but find that not only do I have to force myself to eat vegetables, but I lack enough ways to cook them besides the handy but boring steaming and stir frying. Many farmers’ market patrons and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members have a similar problem. However, Basics with a Twist (available here), by Kim Sanwald, has truly inspired me to transform my own cooking with the same zeal and enthusiasm as blogger and author Julie Powell had when she cooked her way through Julia Child’s classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

As a truck farmer at Brickyard Farms in southwestern Michigan, Sanwald and her partner, Valerie Lane, grow 17 varieties of tomatoes, seven varieties of potatoes, hard garlic, three varieties of beets, seven varieties of carrots as well as different greens including collards, kale, Swiss chard, and spinach.

The five-and-a-half acre farm’s success is attributable to the production of fresh, flavorful vegetables grown in good clay soil that has “some amazing minerals” to enhance their “shocking taste.”  This is all done without chemicals or sprays, although the farm is not certified organic.

Last year Sanwald and Lane grew 4,800 tomatoes from 1,500 plants and from 650 seed potatoes, they harvested 7,000 pounds.  Their market customers couldn’t get enough!

In the book, Sanwald takes readers through the growing season by focusing on the farm’s most popular vegetables: Garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and beets. She provides tried and true recipes for salads, soups, stews, sauces, dressings, casseroles, and side dishes that go well with various meats. They make your mouth water just reading them.

But the book is more than a cookbook. It is also a memoir of Sanwald’s complete change of life after 36 years as a manager of a dental office in the city to become a truck farmer–a farmer growing a diverse range of vegetables on a small scale, often sold from truck to consumers or to restaurants–in rural Cloverdale.

Sanwald first started working on the farm in 2007 when she and a group of friends came to Lane’s aid after her partner, Cate Burke, had died unexpectedly from a blood clot at age 46.  Lane had purchased the farm in 2001 after leaving a career as a building and remodeling contractor.

Being close to the land and close to her source of food awakened something in Sanwald despite the fact that the work is hard and dirty and the days are long.

One day as she was harvesting kale she suddenly broke down in tears realizing that she was connecting to the earth in a deeply spiritual way.

“I’m home,” she said.  “I felt like I had arrived.”

Doing what others encouraged or expected her to do had made her unhappy and depressed through most of her life. She found happiness, however, by growing food. Today, she said she rejects hair coloring, make-up and stylish clothes, things that once held great importance for her.  She has also reduced her weight by 30 pounds and two dress sizes.

“I feel better,” she said, “And the better I feel, the more I want to do this work.”

Basics with a Twist shows readers what can happen to a person through greater attention to food.  Ever the cook, Sanwald expresses her appreciation for the aesthetic pleasures of food that is flavorful, healthy, homegrown, home-cooked—and shared with others around a table.

The whole project came about because Sanwald found herself giving out hundreds of recipes to customers at the Fulton Street Farmers’ Market in Grand Rapids, where Brickyard Farms is a vendor. Lane suggested she put the recipes together in a book, however, Sanwald was anxious to write about what her new life as a truck farmer meant to her.

“The book is a validation of who we are and who I am,” she said. “I love to write and cook. It’s my creative outlet and this book stretched me and my learning process. By combining both of these things, I am able to help others as well.”

She has plans to write a second book that encourages people to grow their own gardens.

The book also includes a resource list for people looking for information about self-sustaining and organic methods of farming and gardening as well as commentaries on the local food movement and environmental issues.

A version of this piece was originally published on olgabonfiglio.blogspot.com

Filmmaker Junko Kajino grew up on a farm in Japan and, although she now lives in Chicago, she’s remained interested in the organic farming community back home. In the weeks since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Dai-ichi, Kajino has kept a close eye on the organic rice and vegetable growers in the area and she noticed certain themes in the messages appearing on blogs and social media sites. “They focused on how to reduce radiation, how to cultivate their contaminated land, and what they can grow in their polluted soil,” she recalls.

Despite the severe damage to their land and the heightened concern about ongoing radiation, Kajino says, the farmers were not complaining. Instead, she says, they’ve  started talking about what to plant. “This was the hope I saw in the last several months and I need to document that.”

This spring, Kajino and her filmmaking partner Ed Koziarski will travel to the Tohoku region of Northern Japan to follow several farmers who are working to rebuild. The farms they plan to document—in a film titled Uncanny Terrain—are just outside the evacuation zone (recently extended to 30km), and many are within the 80km warning zone declared by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Still other farms are further away, and have had no reports of nearby high radiation, but they’re still affected by the stigma against food (and people) from the Tohoku region.

Among those they plan to follow is 28-year-old Masanori Yoshida, who left his job as a chef in Tokyo to work his family’s land. In the past, he’s grown what’s called “firefly rice,” named for the lack of pesticides used in the growing process that have allowed the glowing insects to return. “We don’t know if our crops will be safe,” Masanori told the filmmakers. “We can’t ignore this issue. But we won’t stop cultivating our land”

Megumi Kondou is another example. She is still awaiting government approval to return to the farm she evacuated after the earthquake. Rather than rice, she is considering growing canola, which she believes may help reduce radiation in the soil, and is a potential source of biofuel.

There are significant questions at hand about how and when the land in this area can be used. As Koziarski and Kajino wrote on the film’s fundraising page, whether the land can be returned to its natural state, “or whether the farmers must abandon their ancestral homesteads, remains to be seen.”

Koziarski says he’s motivated by what he sees as tragic irony. “These farmers have done everything they can to be responsible stewards of the environment,” he says. “They now see their efforts undermined by the irresponsibility of executives and government officials who concealed the risks of nuclear [energy] in Japan.”

Kajinko echoes this statement. “Some of these farmers have been avoiding these energy sources, [and trying to] live a self-sustaining life. Now they have to find the way to live side by side with radiation. But I believe that they might find hope. And I think that we might all need this lesson sooner or later.”

Learn more about the film, see Uncanny Terrain on the fundraising site, IndieGoGo.

As a rancher and environmental lawyer, when I write or speak about America’s food system, usually it’s related to impacts on natural resources–air, water, and soils. But these last few years I’ve also become increasingly interested in how what we eat, and the way we eat, affects our health. With diet related problems like obesity and type II diabetes reaching dangerous levels, public officials finally seem poised to take action on what has grown into a crisis. At the same time, thousands of diverse individuals all over the country–from moms to school administrators to farmers–are taking food matters into their own hands. The reality is that truly changing the way America eats and produces its food will require both public and private action.

It’s no secret why we’re seeing more policy initiatives to remake America’s diet. Two out of every three Americans are now heavier than is recommended for good health. From just 1970 to 2003, the average US caloric intake increased by 523 calories. Sugar consumption has skyrocketed, increasing over 60 percent from 1900 to 2000. And that’s all while we’ve become dramatically less active, driving everywhere and performing less physical labor. (Interestingly, saturated fat consumption has actually decreased by more than 20 percent over the 20th century–because people have shifted away from using animal fats in cooking and baking–but that’s another story).

Did you know that your kids are swallowing a whopping 48 teaspoons of sugar with each Double Gulp from their neighborhood 7-11?

Americans’ sugar addiction is one reason why the concept of taxing soda pop is rapidly gaining popularity among several states and cities. As Dr. Kelly Brownell, of Yale University’s Rudd Center, explains, we select the defaults when making food choices–things that are cheap, easy and convenient. And unfortunately, sodas–often huge ones over 50 ounces–have now become the default beverages for many American adults and children. Data shows that simply raising the price on sodas would lower total average calories consumed by over 100 calories a day, helping to shrink American waistlines.

I think the soda tax idea has some merit, and, like Brownell, I’ve come to believe that public policy changes will be necessary to seriously reverse current dietary and health trends. But I find the efforts of individuals–creative food entrepreneurs of all types–just as promising.

Since I started working on food and agriculture issues over ten years ago, I’ve been on farms and at food events all across the United States. Some of the most exciting things I’ve seen are projects put together by local, private citizens who simply wanted their families and communities to have better food.

As a rancher myself, I’ve been impressed and inspired by young farmers cropping up across the country. My husband Bill and I were especially honored to be the keynote speakers at this year’s Young Farmers Conference at the Stone Barns Educational Center in New York. There, we met dozens of men and women in their twenties and thirties who were starting smaller scale, ecologically minded, diversified farms in every region of the country. Remarkably, almost none of the starting farmers I’ve met grew up on farms or went to agricultural colleges. This tells me there’s a whole new crop of farmers who don’t want to follow the path of conventional agriculture, instead aiming to grow food that’s healthy for our bodies, environment, and communities. They are re-creating American agriculture one farm at a time.

And the fight to reclaim the food landscape is spreading into schools. Parents, students, and other food activists are getting rid of soda and junk food in vending machines and cafeterias. Even better, parents, including some professional chefs like Bill Telepan in New York City, have donated countless hours of their own time to improve the food offered in school lunches. There are enormous obstacles to changing school lunches but thousands of volunteers–and even some federal legislation, which added $125 million to school food service kitchen equipment in the past two years–are making it happen.

Some of most exceptional American efforts will be recognized by the Natural Resources Defense Council at their 2011 Growing Green Awards in San Francisco on April 28. I’m really looking forward to spending the evening with Michael Pollan, Laurie David, and the fantastic Growing Green Award winners. Honoring such unique, individual efforts is helping to bring the remarkable work of sustainable food and agriculture pioneers, both young and old, into mainstream American culture.

These extraordinary food leaders are transforming what and how we eat. It’s the primary reason why I am truly optimistic about the future of the food we eat here in America.

Take a look at the winners of last year’s NRDC Growing Green Awards:

Originally published on Huffington Post