Let’s not confuse “agriculture” with “agrarianism” says Steven McFadden in his new book, The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century. Then we might think more deeply about our relationship to the earth.

Our industrialized food system with its processed foods; confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs); long-distance distribution networks; chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers; and genetically-engineered seeds (GMOs) is totally dependent on oil and technology. However, it overlooks our relationship with the land.

“As a matter of survival, the land is calling out to us. As a matter of survival, we must listen and respond,” he says. “We have the potential to do this with a wisdom that will reverberate for generations to come.”

McFadden is a journalist and Reiki Master who is also influenced by Native American spirituality. In fact, he produces an e-book, “Native Knowings: Wisdom Keys for 2012 and Beyond.” It taps the wisdom of contemporary Native American spiritual elders regarding the land, which can be especially useful as we transition out of the Oil Age.

Basically, the book is a resource guide describing projects citizens, communities, farmers, churches, and even corporations have pursued as options to our industrialized food system. The book also provides information for readers who want to become part of a network for change.

Although Call of the Land makes for somewhat dry reading, its advocacy for an “agrarian ethos” that seeks an “environmentally sound, economically viable, and socially fair” way of life is inspiring. What this means is that we must be in right relationship with the land and organic farming is key. Its methods, even though they are labor-intensive and time-consuming, will result in wholesale social and economic reform that needs to take place in order to “heal the land.”

People are “healing the land” to make “sustainable oases” in their neighborhoods and communities because they are stepping up to provide their own leadership, gifts and talents rather than rely on government or some outside body to give them answers to our future.

“The best and possibly the only way to ensure a healthy, sustainable future is to create it,” says McFadden.

He also contends that if we choose agrarianism, we can “encircle the Earth with a sustainable culture of integrity, beauty and natural prosperity.”

Lofty words and visions but they could be indeed a means toward a more sustainable future and a closer, more authentic relationship with the land, Nature and each other.

As has been reported here before, choosing to farm sustainably is not a call to forsake technology, lower your productivity, and mortify your flesh. Far from “returning to the 19th century” (the straw man that some critics love to first erect and then tear down), contemporary sustainable farming methods are rooted in a careful balancing of the old and the new. In other words, we will no more blindly accept tradition than we will heedlessly race after the newest fad, simply because a someone swears that the latest model will solve all your problems and wash the dishes too.

First, to the charge that sustainable ag is populated with luddites, techno-phobics, and hippies: good farmers love new ideas and technology and gratefully integrate them into a financially and environmentally sustainable system. They check weather reports obsessively the better to anticipate rain, frost, or drought—armed with this warning system, they are able to start growing earlier and end later, thereby producing more food. They use floating row covers (what looks like long, thin white sheets) to create a nonchemical barrier between crops and pests, to warm the earth for earlier planting, and to hold moisture in the soil. They employ portable electric fencing, without which intensive grass-based grazing systems could never have achieved the land restoring successes of farms like Joel Salatin’s Polyface. The type of farming practiced by today’s best farmers could never have happened in a previous century, because it takes advantage of recent inventions and a great deal of scientific knowledge that did not exist previously.

It is critically important to remember, however, that science and the scientific method are not a replacement for nature. Giving preference to one over the other is like hopping around on one leg when you have two perfectly good feet: you can get around for a while, but you’re liable to fall over eventually.

Last week, the young greenhorns of the Western Massachusetts CRAFT program visited Natural Roots Farm near Shelburne Falls, MA. Natural Roots is unusual in New England in that it is a strictly horse powered farm; the majority of the remaining draft horse farms in the U.S. are either in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Indiana, where large Amish populations still exist. Farmer David and his partner Anna are not Amish, however (though David’s outstanding beard might suggest otherwise); they are simply a farming family that finds horses both a pleasurable and practical part of their farm system.

To me, inexperienced with draftwork, the harnesses seemed a indecipherable web of buckles and leather, but apprentices Rachel and Dan deftly moved the horses from implement to implement, first discing a field, then mowing a cover crop, then lightly cultivating a bed. Their vegetables were immaculate in the field, their cover crops tall and strong. Watching David drive the team across a freshly turned field, you could easily form a Romantic (or skeptical) impression of their work. But if all you took from the farm was the idea of draft power versus tractor power, you would fail to capture the full lesson of Natural Roots. David farms with horses, but he also manages his cover crops intensively for weed supression and takes soil samples monthly to see how fertility levels fluctuate throughout the season. He feeds his crops a foliar spray of organic amendments for elements he considers insufficiently present in the soil, in hopes that healthy plants will ward off pests and diseases. And as we gathered to begin the tour he showed us the washing station in their new barn, which had been carefully designed for maximum efficiency and minimal waste. This is not your grandfather’s hobby farm.

Afterward, as I spoke to Rachel, one of the apprentices at Natural Roots, she described how visitors had once come to the farm wanting a photo op of teamsters at work. “Make it look hard!” the photographer requested, as Rachel drove the team through the field. She laughed at the memory, “That’s the whole point,” she said, “the horses do the hard work so that we don’t!” Indeed, the apprentices at Natural Roots never hoe and rarely weed by hand—cultivation with horses and cover cropping keep weeds to a minimum.

Sustainable farmers want results—good food, certainly, but also a healthy biological system—and we farm in a way that fulfills us personally. Some of us (yours truly) like to hoe, but simultaneously appreciate the thoughtful use of a tractor. Some others of us prefer the clinking of horse harnesses to the belch and roar of machinery. The beauty of farming is its great flexibility. There are a great many paths from seed to salad mix, which respect the soil in equal, though different, measure. “Sustainable agriculture” encompasses environmental impact, but also finances, practicality, and a farmer’s well-being. The myth of industrial ag is that we have everything—more food than Americans even eat, successful family farms, safe food, and dirt cheap prices. The reality is not so simplistically cheery, but nor is it a dismal tale of hunger and societal collapse. As Natural Roots declares it its existance and success, we can grow into our future without denying our past.

The connection is simple – the health of America’s eaters depends on the health of the food and agriculture system.

Diet-related diseases continue to escalate – specifically in our children. Researchers predict that as a result of the continued rise in overweight, the children of today will have a shorter lifespan than their parents. Overweight and obesity alone have translated into skyrocketing health care costs which are bankrupting families and the health care system.

Likewise, the number of family farms and acres used for growing food is falling, while the cost of farm inputs are increasing. Subsidized crops such as corn, soybeans and wheat have flooded supermarkets with more processed, packaged “food-like” substances. Often, these foods are of low nutritional value and high in sugar, fat and salt.

A dichotomy exists between agriculture policies and Dietary Guidelines for Americans – yet, ironically, both are overseen by the USDA. Current food and farm policies stand in the way of making healthy food the easiest choice.

Food and agriculture policies must support disease prevention efforts and can save millions in health care costs. The USDA and USDHHS must use sound science, instead of pressures from special interests like biotechnology companies and the food industry, to reform policies and programs that support a healthy and sustainable food and agriculture system.

As Vilsack and Daschle assume their cabinet positions in January, they should adopt the words of author and farmer Wendell Berry who said “eating is an agricultural act,” and agree to the following resolutions that build healthy land, eaters, farms and the economy.

Work Together. It sounds easy but USDA and USDHHS do not have a strong working relationship on initiatives that focus on healthy individuals, families, farms and communities. To build this relationship and refocus attention on food that supports health, an interdepartmental Food Policy Council, led by a Food Czar, should be established to assure farm, food and nutrition policies and programs support public health goals. In addition to working with other Federal agencies like the FDA, EPA and the Interior Department, this would eliminate counteraction of programs and policies while increasing program integrity, efficiency and accountability.

Build Fertile Soil. Healthy soil grows healthy food. Soil is a critical component of the earth’s life support system, and how soil is managed determines our ability to grow food for future generations. In June 2008, Iowa experienced unprecedented flooding that destroyed land, homes, businesses and communities. According to the Iowa Daily Erosion Project, 60% of Iowa’s counties lost seven tons of soil per acre that month. Soil loss reduces our ability to grow food. Simply, without soil there would be no farms, and without farms there would be no food. And without food, our health and communities deteriorate. To retain this natural resource, agriculture and land management policies must focus on protecting, preserving and rebuilding fertile soil. Farmers should receive support or credits for decreasing use of synthetic farm chemicals, protecting natural resources, building soil, reducing fossil fuel use and capturing carbon.

Grow More Fruits and Vegetables. Healthy people need healthy food. A diet rich in fruits and vegetables maximizes health. According to the USDA, if each of us ate the recommended servings of foods according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, U.S. farms would need to produce an additional 7.6 million acres in fruit and 6.5 million additional acres in vegetables. Our agriculture system does not grow enough of the right foods that promote our health. We are forced to rely on other countries to put fruits and vegetables on our plates. As we grow fewer types of food, the variety of foods we eat decreases. This leads to lower nutritional quality of our diets, increases our risk of diet-related disease and compromises our domestic nutrition security. To boost fruit and vegetable production, we need to revitalize farm policies that support diversified small and mid-sized farms and local processors, thereby decreasing our reliance on other countries to support healthy diets.

Make Healthy Food the Easiest Choice. As we increase our consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains, we lower our risk of developing obesity, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers. Less disease means lower health care costs. Yet, healthy foods are not always the easiest choice and the cost of nutritious food or the distance one has to travel to purchase healthy food often is the deal-breaker for low-income families. The same applies to federal food and nutrition assistance programs. When food costs rise, fewer people are served or services are cut. In 2009, Congress will reauthorize the Child Nutrition and WIC Act. Administered by USDA, programs such as WIC and the National School Lunch Program offer tremendous health benefits to children. For example, USDA and USDHHS could work together to lift the severe cost constraints that limit the purchase of healthy, fresh foods within these programs. Improving the nutritional quality of the WIC food package and the foods served in schools will nourish healthy children, prepare them to learn, reduce childhood diseases, reduce food insecurity and produce healthy, productive adults. The nutritional health of our children is the foundation for community and economic development.

Leverage Food Production as Community Economic Development. On average, fresh produce travels about 1500 miles before it appears on plates in the Midwest. Approximately 90% of the food consumed in Iowa is not grown in Iowa. As supply channels lengthen, our food becomes more vulnerable. Growing more food closer to where we eat it increases our access to fresh seasonal food, cultivates a closer relationship with farmers, and builds community resiliency, economic stability, food security and health. Buying food directly from farmers generates revenue that is reinvested within communities and strengthens local economies. According to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, if Iowans ate five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, and Iowa farmers supplied that produce for three months of the year, these additional crops would add $300 million and more than 4,000 jobs to the Iowa economy. Agriculture and health policies working together to leverage food production as a community asset will strengthen economic development while increasing access to fresh, seasonal and delicious food.

English agronomist Sir Albert Howard said, “Soil is the basis of the public health system.” Healthy soil grows healthy food and healthy food nourishes healthy people. Although written more than 60 years ago, the science holds true today and hopefully will become a guiding principle for both Vilsack and Daschle as they assume their positions in January.

Yesterday, two of the sustainable food movements great leaders, Wes Jackson, plant geneticist and president of the Land Institute, and farmer/writer Wendell Berry opined on their growing concern for the havoc we are wreaking on our soil.

They talked about the long term damage of even normal rainfall, “by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland” — should there not be practices in place to consciously rebuild the soil — and went on to state outright the other great threat, “degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.”

Those alien technologies and procedures? Our current industrial agriculture system, which promotes a one-crop-at-a-time policy, and ignores the lessons learned over 10,000 years of agricultural practices (inter-cropping, small-scale farming using minimal oil inputs), instead promoting the discoveries from agribusiness-funded labs over the last half-century.

Most chillingly, Berry and Jackson reminded us that “Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland.” For further reading, see Jerad Diamond’s best-seller Collapse.

But they didn’t stop there.  The authors throw the gantlet down on the theory and values behind our economy over the last 50-60 years, when “we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food.”  They go on:

“If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.”

Their suggestions included increasing acreage in perennial plants and long term thinking in our next Farm Bill.  But will Obama stop taking the limp approach to food that he has so far (see Vilsack) and finally recognize the centrality that food has to all other issues?  We shall see.

The authors credit the growing interest of producers and consumers for beginning to change our unhappy fate.   I for one don’t know enough about soil, but I’m learning.  I’ve decided to begin composting in my basement — I’ll be picking up my worm house from the Union Square farmer’s market on Saturday.  And I’m hoping to set up a composting station on the roof for myself and my neighbors in the springtime, hopefully to produce some good soil for our garden.

I know for most people, the word soil alone is enough to make your eyes grow heavy.  But it is time to wake up to the fact that our whole life is dependent on good topsoil, and we are slowly but surely sealing our own fate.

Greenhorn is a word I expect I’ll hear fairly often in years to come. A greenhorn, according to Severine von Tscharner Fleming, Paula Manalo and Zoe Bradbury – authors of the newly released second edition of The Guide for Beginning Farmers is “a novice, or new entrant into agriculture.” To be precise, it is a certain kind of new entrant into agriculture: one who was not raised to farm and who has no family farm to inherit but who is unconventionally and some would say irrationally choosing to become a farmer, no matter his or her lack of education and resources. Touches of madness are not uncommon among greenhorns. Gutfuls of passion aren’t either.

In the authors’ words, The Guide for Beginning Farmers is “part pep-talk, part institutional index, part career-planning guide” for greenhorns. It is a work in progress. While the authors seek a publishing house willing to expand it into a full-length book, The Guide serves as a “first, early stab” at compiling resources for young people who hear the call to farm but have no place to dig in. The Guide gives them long-ish lists of apprenticeships and mentorships; land trusts and FarmLink programs that help new farmers find land; books on organic cultivation; books on smart business; local, state and federal loans and grants for starting farms; even consumer and food activist organizations that support sustainable agriculture, food access and farmworkers’ rights. There are plenty of places to begin.

Reading through the breadth and number of these lists gives the sense that The Guide is still very incomplete. There must be many more manuals, funding sources, apprenticeship listings and unclaimed parcels of land than the authors have been able to compile. There are people farming wisely and organizations supporting their efforts in every state in this country. It seems to me that programs and policies to incubate new farmers already exist; they’re not extensive, they’re not all tested and they’re not widely known, but they are ideas to try and replicate. Books on how to manage a sustainable and profitable farm are in print. Innovative, successful models of urban and rural food production that meet the specific needs of our time are out there. It seems to me, then, that what we really lack in the movement to create millions of new farmers is awareness. There aren’t too many Americans asking for a Guide for Beginning Farmers. There might be more if city people who condemn corn syrup and demand good food also demand that incentives be put in place to make farming an economically and socially viable profession. Or if they speak up and declare that farming is radical; that farmers, no matter how they do it, are heroes. The first obstacle in creating millions of new farmers is not a shortage of land and capital; twenty-somethings have too little farm experience and too many student loans to buy land anyway. The first obstacle is getting agriculture onto the minds of twenty-somethings before they decide that medicine or banking or pop music or drug dealing is the only way to ensure a “respectable” quality of life.

Hence what I admire most about The Guide for Beginning Farmers is not its references to so many websites but the way it reads, at times, like a Manifesto for Beginning Farmers. In future editions, I suggest the authors play up the joy of growing food and the role of farmers in any sustainable, healthy and just society. They’ve already begun it on Serve Your Country Food, a website The Greenhorns have produced to document, connect and support the work of young farmers. Manifestos are risky, but they’re also exciting. Excitement grabs attention and starts movements. We’ll never know if the existing programs for new farmers or the ones now being proposed are worth their weight if young people don’t demand the chance to try them out.

This post is part of Gordon Jenkins’s Young Farmers Unite series, where he writes and invites others to write on the challenges young farmers face, and how we can support new farmers at their profession.

In his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver, Barack Obama told us, “America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done… Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save.” The group of about 20 of us who were listening to his speech on a laptop as we got ready for the “young farmers seed swap” about to take place at Slow Food Nation stood straight up and smiled. “Did he say farms? Does he mean that?” As 80 other young activists, students, cooks and farmers streamed into the room, that phrase – “farms to save” – swam circles in our ears. Obama was confirming what we are all beginning to feel is mission of our generation: saving farms, rebuilding the food system, digging back into the land. He didn’t mention what kind of farms we have to save, but he did imply that the future of the economy and of our cities is bound to the future of agriculture and that the security and livelihood of our nation depends on our ability to grow food. That’s an old-fashioned idea, but it’s still a big one—even to young people.

The people in that room knew that if we’re going to save farms, the first challenge we’ll face is finding farmers willing do it. In 2002, the U.S. Agricultural Census reported that the average age of the American farmer is 55. Between 1 and 2% of the U.S. population works on farms; that’s fewer than are in prison. Since the 1950s, agribusiness, with the backing of the U.S. government, has worked hard to put machines, instead of people, on farms, claiming that factory farming produces the cheapest food and frees Americans from the “drudgery” of having to grow and prepare their own meals. As a result, generations of farmers’ sons and daughters have fled the land, seeking jobs and city lives that are marginally more secure. Today, many of the people working on U.S. farms are new immigrant laborers who have no rights, earn below-minimum wages and can’t avoid being exploited. The impression of the people farming the land today is that they’re the people the rest of the country would prefer to ignore.

In a time of concurrent economic, energy, climate and health crises, we’re beginning to realize how badly our country needs to rebuild its food and agriculture system. We should also realize that a food system that is good for us, good for our communities and good for the planet is going to rely on small-scale, diversified agriculture and is therefore going to require a lot more human labor. The U.S. needs millions of new farmers. But right now, that’s good news. Millions of people are losing their jobs this year and millions more need real food. Were we to invest in a healthy food and agriculture system today, we would create jobs at every level that not only boost our economy but also put healthy food on our tables, return money to rural communities and clean up our carbon footprint. (And we should all tell Obama we think so.)

There’s a vanguard of young people taking it upon themselves to find or create careers in agriculture, but it’s mostly idealistic college graduates. Those are the mad young farmers-to-be who gather at San Francisco seed swaps and raise their fists in solidarity when they hear Obama say “farms to save.” (I’m one of them.) As a group, we hope that we’re paving the way for other young people, and we hope we’ll soon be implementing programs and policy that incubate new farmers, but we’re admittedly not a “young farmer movement.” We don’t represent the wide swath of people this country will need to see farming real soon. We’re not going to see that swath of people farming until rural communities can sustain real economic security and provide the nurturing social fabric that makes life livable. “Ordinary Americans” won’t put their hands in the dirt until their neighbors consider farming a noble profession and are proud to shake the calloused hands that feed them. The prospect of jobs may lure people back to the land – or into parks and onto urban rooftops – but they won’t stay unless we train them to grow food and respect them for doing so. To ensure that the next generation of farmers is substantial and serious enough to fix our broken food system, farms will need an economic infrastructure (read: local processing facilities and markets for quality food) and a cultural vitality (read: internet access and things to do on the weekend) that make farm life viable.

That’s a radical agenda; to see it happen, every one of us, farmer or not, will have to rethink the way we interact with the land and with each other. But we will reap its rewards: strong urban and rural economies, healthy communities, a safe and secure food system, a habitable planet. There’s a lot of work to be done in readying the next generation to farm the land, and Obama’s right: we cannot turn back. We have to look forward, and from where I’m standing, the future looks full of promise.

This post is part of Gordon Jenkins’s Young Farmers Unite series, where he writes and invites others to write on the challenges young farmers face, and how we can support new farmers at their profession.

Photo: growing youth project

If we can make the right choices about where our food comes from, we can change the world. Protecting farmland is the first vital step.

—Alice Waters

When Ellen Straus, a dairywoman from Marshall, California, gazed out from her family’s farm in the early 1970s, she saw practically the same sight as those who raised livestock there 150 years before would had seen. And it was just about the same view a coastal traveler on this section of Highway One, located about 50 miles north of San Francisco, would see today: rolling hills, ranches, and the sparkling estuarine waters of Tomales Bay.

But Ellen knew that all of this was threatened. The County of Marin had devised a plan for the westernmost part of the county that envisioned a city of 150,000 people on the shores of Tomales Bay. Highways, shopping centers, golf courses, and car dealerships would have replaced the bucolic scene and ended a way of life for her and other farming families who had made a living from the land since the time of the Gold Rush. (In those days, Point Reyes butter was known as “the other gold.”)

Thanks to the efforts of those who were concerned about the loss of this unique landscape, thanks to newly elected supervisors who opposed development of this type, and thanks to the creation of strict zoning laws, the plan was scrapped. But zoning laws are easily changed. On any Tuesday, three of the five Marin County supervisors could vote to modify the restrictions that keep the land protected. (Fortunately, today’s supervisors are very supportive of agriculture. In the 2007 Marin Countywide Plan, they reaffirm their commitment to it.)

So no one who knew Ellen Straus was surprised when she and her friend Phyllis Faber, a botanist from Mill Valley, came up with the idea of a land trust that would both permanently protect the land from development and provide some sense of certainty for the farmers and ranchers that there would be a future for agriculture in Marin County. At the time, no one had ever used the concept of a land trust to protect farmland.

Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), the nonprofit organization they started in 1980, was the first land trust in the nation to focus on agriculture.

So far, it’s protected almost 41,000 acres of farmland on 63 family farms and ranches. MALT isn’t resting on its laurels, though. One million acres of American farmland were paved over last year and, in Marin, 60,000 acres are still at risk, mainly from estate buyers.

Happily, some of the Bay Area’s most tastiest dairy products and organic crops are produced on farmland already protected by MALT conservation easements, which total more than 40,000 acres on 63 family farms and ranches. If you’ve tasted Straus Family Creamery milk, Cowgirl Creamery Cheese, Point Reyes Farmstead Blue Cheese, or Sartori Farm strawberries, or sipped wines from Stubbs Vineyard, you’ve tasted food produced on land protected by MALT agricultural conservation easements in voluntary agreements with the landowners.

At Slow Food Nation, MALT and its Taste of Marin partners, Marin Agricultural Institute/Marin Farmers Markets, and Marin Organic will be offering tours of some of the farms it has protected as part of the SFN Slow Journeys (unfortunately, all Marin tours are sold out, but check out those being hosted by our friends in neighboring Bay area counties. MALT also regularly offers its own Hikes & Tours of these and other family farms).

Also, as part of Slow Food Nation’s Slow Dinners, on Saturday, August 30, award-winning chef Annie Somerville will create a fabulous vegetarian dinner in the new private dining room at Greens restaurant with its spectacular views of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay, all to benefit MALT.

Plus, best-selling cookbook author Deborah Madison, the original chef at Greens, will attend Saturday night’s benefit dinner and is offering two seats at her table. For a chance to win dinner with Deborah go to Culinate.com (where she writes a monthly column, “Local Flavors”), and sign up for a trial of Culinate’s weekly e-newsletter. Culinate will select one person to win two tickets to the benefit dinner.

Last but not least, stop by the Point Reyes Books stalls (they’re the official booksellers at SFN) at the three Slow Food Nation sites, Fort Mason, Civic Center and Herbst Theatre. Point Reyes Books is organizing a free author’s series and book signings (the schedule will be on its web site very soon), plus you can get a free copy of Marin Farm Families—Stories & Recipes, a $12 value, with every purchase over $25.00 made during Slow Food Nation weekend.

MALT helped produce the book which includes recipes by Amy Nathan-Weber, Peggy Smith, Gerald Gass, and other food professionals who live or work in West Marin. But for the most part, the recipes have not been tested in any kitchens but the ones belonging to the farming families who have provided them. The ingredients are sometimes straight from the field, like Tomales farmer David Little’s Pouch Potatoes, and sometimes straight from the pantry like the stale French bread used to make Mamma Grossi’s Bread Soup. In every case, they’re the product of a desire to satisfy a hunger for good food made with love for family and friends.

To learn more about Marin Agricultural Land Trust and Marin’s family farms and the food they produce, visit www.malt.org.

Images, from top: Farmland above Tomales Bay ©Marin Agricultural Land Trust; Strawberries from Sartori Farm, Tomales ©Paige Green for Marin Agricultural Land Trust; Tom Stubbs at his vineyard in Marin County ©Paige Green for Marin Agricultural Land Trust; Marin Farm Families—Stories & Recipes, a little book about diversity, adversity, tenaciousness, extraordinary devotion & FOOD!

All human life — all terrestrial life, in fact — relies on that thin, fragile layer of topsoil that covers much of the non-oceanic earth. In a large sense, human societies rise and fall, thrive and decline, based on how well they nourish their topsoil. I’m not a huge fan of Jared Diamond, but his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed teases out an important lesson: burning through your share of topsoil leads to catastrophe.

Yet in post-industrial (that is to say, post-agricultural) society, our links to the land that sustains us have become so stretched, so abstract, that people have largely forgotten about the importance of soil. I see this most graphically in our political class’ euphoric embrace of ethanol — an allegedly “renewable” fuel that’s based on corn, our most soil-depleting crop.

Recent events in the Midwest, one of the globe’s greatest natural stores of topsoil, may yet force us to come to terms with the ground beneath our feet. Coverage of the early-summer floods that hammered the Corn Belt understandably focused on displaced people and ruined crops. But as this Associated Press article makes clear, the storms also washed away untold tons of fertile topsoil.

With the growing season going full bore and with some fields in Illinois still under water, it’s still impossible to know just how much topsoil the Midwest surrendered. Early indications aren’t encouraging. The AP reporter visited one Indiana corn farmer whose fields lie near the White River. Flooding became so powerful that the river’s overflow cut a “a channel with steep 12-foot banks at the edge” right into his cornfield. Such devastation evidently permeates Indiana. “Silt is piled up like sand dunes and uprooted trees still litter cornfields more than a month after the floods,” AP reports.

“It takes thousands of years to form one inch of topsoil,” an Indiana official told the AP. “Within a day, we lost it. It’s just devastating.”

The AP story effectively illustrates the storms’ effect on topsoil, but it doesn’t dig in to find the root cause: human-engineered changes in the land. In short, the practice of subjecting huge swaths of land to intensive monocrop agriculture makes it extremely vulnerable to topsoil loss from heavy rains. In the past 15 years, the Midwest has been subjected to two “100 year storms,” and both involved catastrophic flooding and topsoil loss.

Yet those hardly count as natural disasters, as a recent Washington Post article by Joel Achenbach makes clear. Rather, devastation from the floods stemmed from egregious land-use decisions, Achenbach found. Achenbach relates an interview he conducted with agriculture expert Kamyar Enshayan of the University of Northern Iowa:

[Enshayan] points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed. “We’ve done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions,” he said. “Agriculture must respect the limits of nature.”

Of course, the pressures detailed by Enshayan have only intensified in recent years, spurred on by the government-dictated ethanol boom. To meet this year’s biofuel mandate under the 2007 Energy Act, at least a third of this year’s corn crop will be diverted into ethanol factories — nearly double the level of just three years ago. That spike in demand has caused corn price to triple in just three years, inspiring a mad rush to plant as much corn as possible.

In the 1970s, another sudden jump in grain prices — this one caused by a massive government-engineered grain sale to the Soviet Union — created a similar gold rush for industrial agriculture. The results of that short-lived boom bear heeding. From the veteran Washington Post reporter Dan Morgan in his 1979 book Merchants of Grain:

The land itself exhibited the scars of … the grain economy. Along the North Carolina coast, Italian and Japanese investors bought tens of thousands of acres of marshy wetlands, cleared the trees with bulldozers and Caterpillar tractors, installed drainage ditches, and announced plans for “superfarms.” The incentives were corn at $3.00 a bushel and soybeans at $6.50; the world needed more food. But environmentalists in the state expressed concern about the effect of the runoff of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides on the fish and wildlife in the coastal waterways. Investors also purchased marginal farmland in the western edge of the corn belt in Nebraska and ordered fragile grasslands to the plow. Groves of trees, planted under federal programs in the 1930s to prevent soil erosion, were bulldozed so that spindly irrigation systems that wheeled around a central well in 160-acre circles could move unhindered. The land irrigated by these watering systems was plowed, diked, and planted to corn. After the corn was harvested, the thin layer of topsoil blew away in many places, leaving gashes of dunelike sand in the fields of Nebraska.

Photo 1 by iowa_spirit_walker
Photo 2 by sundaykofax
Photo 3 by ellenmac11

This is the second and final portion of my interview with Dan Imhoff, the author of Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Farm Bill, a book about the outcome of the 2008 Farm Bill and what we can do to effect change despite business as usual in Washington. He will be taking part in Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought panel series, and is co-author of the Vision Statement for Agriculture and Food Policy for the 21st Century, being presented at SFN August 28th.

Part 1 of this interview can be found here.

Paula: What would a different, better version of the Farm Bill look like?

Dan: First of all, farmers would have to be enrolled in some kind of stewardship program before they can get anything at all, and they should be rewarded for how well they farm, instead of how much in commodities that they are putting into the pipeline. And why direct giveaways [for things like waste mitigation]? I mean these are big corporations, why can’t they be loans, why don’t they have to be paid back? I mean they are just complying with the Clean Air and the Clean Water Act, these are things that, if they are treated as industries, which they really are, they would have to be doing with there own money. There has to be some kind of responsibility. Are you helping to preserve the land, maintain it so that we can pass it on to the next generation? Are we doing research, finding beneficial ways to grow crops, for when we are not going to be able to afford petroleum-based fertilizers? Are we starting to build the infrastructure for a regional food system we are going to desperately need when oil tops off at $500 per barrel? Are we rewarding farmers for growing a diversity of crops, actually contributing to producing healthier food that can be fed to the kids in our schools?

Paula: Do you see agribusiness lobbyists as the main obstacle to a fairer Farm Bill and a better system?

Dan: Agribusiness lobbyists and the inability to enforce the anti-trust laws that we already have on the books are two huge obstacles, absolutely. I would say there is a real lack of a vision, getting back to what you asked earlier about the objectives, I don’t think there are clear objectives for a healthy food and farming system like you might think, that there are “ten principles” that everyone who walks into the USDA looks at on the board and goes, “better food, better farmlands, healthier future for America.”

Paula: You discuss the industrial agriculture system as unsustainable in your book, Food Fight. Do you think it is possible to feed as many people that are on the planet without the use of industrial agriculture?

Dan: Yeah, I think increasingly, you see that there are some pretty good studies that say that it is the small, diverse systems that can either equally produce or out produce most industrial systems. I think we will increasingly see that the cost of maintaining those industrial systems, the fertilizers and long distances and all the chemical inputs [becoming] unaffordable. I would hope that regions all across the country are starting to have meetings to say that this is the kind of food system that we want, so in three years time, they can go to their elected representatives. Because that was really a big part of what was absent in the discussions this time, long term planning, region by region. I think extremely quickly we are going to have to have a far more regionally based production capacity. And I don’t think people are aware of just how quickly things can change. How quickly the cost of energy [and] severe storm events can influence the food and farming sector.

Paula: You are producing the Vision Statement for a new Food, Farm and Agriculture Policy, being presented at Slow Food Nation. Could you give us a taste of that proposal?

Dan: We will try to make the point that a healthy food and agriculture system is the basis of a secure country and a secure world. And the current system that we have is not sustainable, it is out of balance and it is breaking down. We can see that in the food riots, escalating food prices, and in parts of the country where they’ve re-plumed the hydrology to industrially farm corn so that [the land] can no longer absorb water in huge flood events. And I think that what we need is, I hope, some kind of vision that says it’s our duty, as citizens, as parents, as farmers, as eaters, to try to make the healthiest food system we can, that we can pass on to the next generation. One of the things that was severely absent in this Farm Bill was the voice of the medical community. The medical cost of the obesity crisis is four times what we are spending on the commodity programs. Just think if we started to think differently, if we started to think of healthy food as preventative medicine. Ultimately it’s going to save us costs in other areas. We should be investing in our health, first and foremost, because I think in the long run it will save us money and it will do so much more to help us to feel healthy as a nation.

Paula: What can the average citizen do?

Dan: Just learn as much as you can. Don’t let your representatives off the hook. Vote with your fork, eat like an activist, and just try as best as you can to bring your goals for the planet in line with your diet and how you vote and how you live your life.

Photo by Jan Tik