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.

Almost two years after its founding in a basement in Berkeley, California, The Greenhorns has matured from an idea for a recruitment film into a widespread national community. We are now happily rooted on my first commercial farm, Smithereen, on rented land in the Hudson Valley of New York.

In the autumn of 2007 we officially began seeking out mentors and characters for a film, traveling the country with a confident intuitive sense of an emerging movement of young farmers and a series of borrowed cameras and generous cinematographers. On the road for these 2 years we have found that the movement has emerged—scrappy, resourceful, adaptive young Americans have brought the products and the spirit of this movement into the sun, and we are proud to be the reporters of its successes and a hub for a much-needed centralized network.

This is America, and it takes all kinds. All over the country we have met enterprising, hopeful greenhorns: descendants of family dairies, punky inner-city gardeners, homesteaders, radical Christians, anarcho-activists, ex-suburbanites, graduates with biological science degrees, ex-teachers, ex-poets, ex-cowboys. The sons of traditional farmers, the daughters of migrant farm workers, the accidental agriculturalists and the deliberate career switchers all mark our maps. In foothills, warehouses, back valleys, and vacant lots they are popping up as we reclaim human spaces in the broad lazerland of monoculture that has engulfed rural America.

This Obama spring finds the young farmers as unlikely poster children of a new zeitgeist. Aptly so. Ranging around the country in my filmmaking, I have met hundreds of new and aspiring young farmers. I have found them a powerful, proud and wily sub-culture. I have found them to be charismatic icons of change, patriots of place, sensible and sensitive stewards of land and resources. They are the creators of a retrofit future, and just in time. We now have the political change.

We have reawakened our democratic will and discovered a dilation in the realms of possibility. We must take advantage of the moment. Yes! We are farming! We are hopeful.

The produce of local agriculture is in hot demand with the most loyal of customers. CSAs all have waiting lists, and healthy mothers determined to have healthy babies are fiercely devoted to nutrition and the farmers who provide it. Popular literature and sensibility is gravitating to our message of health for our selves, our soil, our social fabric. I have learned that it is possible for us to succeed, to prosper; meanwhile the market continues to grow!

Farming in America is simultaneously a privilege and a service. And no, it is not easy. Young farmers in America face tremendous structural obstacles. They seek access to land, capital, education, and business training. They seek cultural support and open minded consumers. They need reasonable paths to acquiring mechanical equipment and other infrastructures of medium-scale agriculture. These are missing components of our culture and our laws, and they are deeply missed by young farmers who are forced to improvise and invent new institutions to serve their new needs and new marketplace.

The movement is for real. Its practitioners are skilled, savvy and ferocious. They are assets to their community and guarantors of our future. They are shovel-ready, shovel-sharpened. Relishers of flavor, recipients of the generosity of photosynthesis. Hellbent on recovering from the age of convenience. They are young farmers with young muscles wisely applying their lives to the problems at hand. But it takes the applied passions of thousands, hundreds of thousands of courageous actions to repair a nation. It will take a radical shift in the structure of the Farm Bill, in the literacy of eaters, in the shape of commerce and land management. It will take the support of you all.

If you are thinking of farming, do!

If you cannot join us, connect with your stomachs and please buy and savor and share our products!

If your kid wants to farm, tell them it’s ok! Help them open a savings account or lend start-up capital to a young farmer in your town.

Please collaborate. Please facilitate. Please donate. Please join us or rally on your own to ensure the success of America’s young farmers.

*Editor’s note: The Greenhorns need a boost of funds in order to finish editing their film. A 15-minute preview was paid for using the deposit on their former office. I know these are hard economic times, but donate on their website if you are able!

For months, I’d been planning to see the French television documentary The World According to Monsanto (Le Monde selon Monsanto, also to be released in spring 2009 in book form), made for the French-German network Arte by the journalist Marie-Monique Robin, which premiered in France March 11, 2008.  Having plenty of reasons to despise Monsanto (Agent Orange, PCBs, global food domination) I thought that this film would only confirm what I knew about the giant agribusiness firm, which controls between 70%-100% of the GM market share for various crops.  Well, I was wrong.  There was more to fear, and seeing it all on film made it more concrete.

Marie-Monique Robin spoke to people in government at the time GM seed was given approval and granted “substantial equivalence,” to farmers in the fields in India, Paraguay, Mexico, and Iowa, and to anyone she encountered in her research that could explain the story on rBGH, seed contamination (The part on Mexico’s corn crop contamination is particularly sad and ominous – I was left wondering whether contamination was part of Monsanto’s plan in the first place), the legacy of Agent Orange, and PCB contamination in Anniston, Alabama.  She leaves not a stone unturned in the Monsanto cabinet of curiosities.  And, folks, we should be scared, very scared about the implications of these details on the future food security in the world.  I left the film certain that Monsanto was responsible for perpetrating a slow and conscious modern holocaust, and should be no less than tried for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court.  Sound extreme?  70% of food on supermarket shelves contains GM food, and scientists in government and university research programs have been fired for speaking out against treating human beings as guinea pigs, aside from all of Monsanto’s other trespasses (Wonder why you didn’t know that 70% of supermarket food contains GMOs? lobbying against labeling).

During this holiday lull, do yourself a favor and watch this film.  It is the most important and fundamental documentary about the future of our food system, and it is available to watch here, or can be bought here.  (Also, here is a great review from Truthout.org last November.)  If you are new to these facts, this movie will convert you to food security issues.  If you know all there is to know about why our food system is broken, this will reinstate your food fighter’s fervor.

The Dervaes family seem like they’ve come from another time. Only instead of on the prairie, they’ve settled within the city limits of Pasadena, where Jules Dervaes and his children Justin, Anais and Jordanne grow over 6,000 pounds of food, power their computers with solar panels and make their own biofuel on a fifth of an acre in the front and back of their house. They are the focus of a new film by Robert McFalls called Homegrown, which tells the story of eco-pioneering, showing viewers a picture of what our not-so-distant future could look like if we were to live up to our eco-ideals.

The story is a simple one: Jules Dervaes dreamt of cultivating the land, but found himself living in the city without the means to resettle somewhere with acreage. One day, after years of thinking about leaving, he decided instead to do away with his lawn, which he considered too much upkeep for very little return. So the family began to grow edible flowers, later moving onto food and animals (they have chicken, geese and goats). Once they got on this track to self-sufficiency, it was easy to jump to changes in the way energy was being used on their homestead.

Though the film paints a captivating portrait, the poignancy of Homegrown doesn’t rest on this particular family’s ambitions as much as it delivers a new vision of the future food system. What the Dervaes are doing, in some ways, is not new. At one point in recent human history (in my case, my grandparents all grew up on farms) we knew our way around a garden patch. Instead, this film shows that after the industrial revolution has come and gone, and the infrastructure that made us great is already in place, our cities having sprawled, how will we reclaim land and provide for ourselves in a world without easy oil? We will, by necessity, have to get smart about our consumption. We will have to make better use of urban space for garden plots. The Dervaes are so admirable precisely because their effort shows that growing enough to feed a family and more is possible with less land than we’d assumed. In other words, they make a great model.

This is the first film by director Robert McFalls, who spoke at the screening at Green Screens, a regular environmental films showcase at Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. He said he was looking for a story about family and persistence. As a food policy wonk, I could have used more specifics on the food, the planting and planning. But then, after saying that to myself at the end of the film, I realized that the Dervaes have a helpful website that could fill in those blanks for me.

Living in the city is at once the most and least ecological choice; you must endure the pollution, crowded conditions and lack of land but you don’t need a car to go to the farmer’s market, and are in contact with like-minded people with whom you can set-up a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Many, including Michael Pollan and Vandana Shiva, are now speaking out on the three-fold energy, food and global warming crisis, saying that these three issues are so intimately connected that they must be dealt with together, and right now. In their way, the Dervaes are doing exactly that. Their genius in growing food in the city is the ability to sell it to local restaurants, creating a relationship between a chef who must have food to serve in order to stay open, and an urban farmer who brings produce by bike or biodiesel car.

But their life is by no means easy. They don’t take vacations, or buy many foods they don’t grow themselves. They often eat the same things again and again. And I could not help but wonder why the grown-up Dervaes children don’t have significant others, and whether or not they will ever move out of their father’s home. Maybe the Dervaes are re-thinking community too, while they are at it. Should we stay close to our families, and create support networks, maybe we would be better adjusted and happier than our doppelganger typing away in a skyscraper cubicle. But it brings into question the notion that President-elect Obama has brought up in his speeches: will we be willing to sacrifice in order to better the planet for all of its inhabitants? Or will we keep going at the rate we are now and see what happens?

Perhaps what we are seeing in Homegrown is a future food system in the making, where, instead of sprawling fields, everyone has a little bit of earth planted.

Edible City is a documentary film focusing on food justice and food security, seen through different urban farming projects in the San Francisco Bay area. It aims to show the grassroots response communities are having to issues like climate change, rising food and gas prices, and health concerns. The film is slated for release in the fall of 2009, but in the meantime, here is a taste of what it is all about. (Enjoy the clips from Food for Thought? Check out the videos)

You to can join the party! There are two upcoming fundraiser events for the film in Berkeley, featuring delicious local nibbles, dessert and wine, October 6th, 7:30 – 9:00 pm and November 1st, 6:00 – 8:00 pm. If you are interested in attending, write: contact@eastbaypictures.com.

Water is a vital part of life, but should it be a commodity? This is the question FLOW explores, not just in developing countries where the issue is paramount, but in the United States as well. Water is currently a $400 billion industry, the third largest behind oil and electricity. Because of pollution, scarcity and corporate control, water availability is the largest issue facing humanity in this century.

Of the 6 billion people on Earth, 1.1 billion do not have access to safe drinking water. In addition, contaminated drinking water kills more humans than AIDS or war. A lack of infrastructure or aging infrastructure that a government can’t afford to upgrade are the leading reasons private companies are invited in to make water distribution deals. But when a private industry, which is beholden to shareholders, gets control of a local water supply, a basic human need, the result is that the community using the water is at risk.

For the most part, local answers, not privatization, are portrayed in this film as the plans that really work to provide clean drinking water. Ashok Gadgil, Senior Staff Scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, came up with a UV treatment for water that costs individuals in villages in India $2 per person per year to utilize and maintain, a sum even those making only a dollar a day can afford. Private industry, often ushered in through deals with the World Bank, create card systems in which users are charged for every gallon they pump. Most locals in these parched communities go instead to polluted rivers and take their chances of getting cholera or other diseases.

We are not immune to issues of infrastructure in the U.S., nor are we immune to water scarcity. The state of California alone is said to have 20 years worth of water left in its borders. New Mexico is said to have 10. Our infrastructure was built following WWII, and is now officially at the breaking point. It is estimated that it will cost U.S. taxpayers $250 billion to fix, and with the economy as it is, this is probably not on the top of our list of priorities.

At Slow Food Nation, the Take Back the Tap initiative and its bottle-free message encouraged 60,000 visitors to think differently about drinking water. Every year, 31 billion bottles of water are purchased, which amounts to $200 billion spent. That water is not necessarily the spring water it claims to be. According to the National Resources Defense Council, in a scientific study in which more than 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of water were tested, about one-third of the bottles contained synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria, and arsenic. Furthermore, there is less than one person regulating the bottled water industry (meaning he/she have another job in addition). FLOW investigated Nestle’s role in depleting the water table in Michigan, where it continues to pump the local water without charge, to be bottled and sold as one of its many brands (including Poland Springs, Perrier and San Pellegrino).

Bottled water came into use as a result of a fear that tap water was not safe. While this was mostly a marketing ploy, there is evidence that we are in an unprecedented time for pollution in our water – Atrazine (which is linked to sex changes in frogs and fish, prostate cancer and lower sperm counts, and is banned in the EU), Prozac, rocket fuel and other chemicals have been found in our water supply, and it is suspected, though no official tally is being kept, that between 500,000 and 7 million people get sick from tap water each year. Worst of all, the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t regulate 51 known water contaminants. What can you do? I use a water filter on my tap, which even filters out most of the chlorine. Here is concise information on filtration.

Water is a human right. FLOW is an important documentary, drawing lines between the multiplicity of issues pertaining to water that we have no choice but to start talking about.

If you are interested in getting involved in the debate, this petition will help water become a part of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Photo: Still from FLOW