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.

This is a story that begins down the road from the Nearing’s Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine, and ends in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1954, Scott and Helen Nearing published Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, which delves into the politics, economy, and pragmatic lessons of their 20th Century homesteading. It became a veritable bible for America’s “Back to the Land” movement in the late 1960s. Today, the Good Life Center (the Nearings’ final homestead) stands as a living museum of this lifestyle. In 2007, my girlfriend and I found ourselves apprenticing at a lovely farm a quarter mile from the Center.

We were working for farmer and author Eliot Coleman, who had made his own pilgrimmage to the Nearings’ farm in the 1960s. Eliot is something of a Scott Nearing protégé; his picturesque Four Season Farm operates on the back half of the Nearings’ farm, which they sold him at the same price they had bought it for: 33 dollars an acre. Both Farm and Center are perched on a cape that juts into the Atlantic, giving this off-the-grid neighborhood an “end of the earth” type beauty. The experience, for us, was like a tutorial in a homesteading lifestyle: root cellars housed apples, beets, and homemade sauerkraut; household gardens grew with the size and diversity of small farms; the homes were hand-built by their owners; and a tradition of bi-weekly, neighborhood saunas still endured from an era when running water wasn’t available for bathing. Eating seasonally wasn’t a matter of intention, but of common sense.

I asked Eliot once what he would do if he were my age today. I was interested to know how a successful back-to-the-land-er from the 70s might navigate the combination of today’s dizzying land values and the burgeoning popularity of local food. His answer: since so much good land is already taken, find a way to farm it for the landowners. Give them a box of veggies every week, and earn your living off the rest. The new “Back to the Land” would be a sort of … well, not “indentured servitude” … but maybe a foodie-esque, Carhartt-toting, symbiotic spin-off of the concept.

My girlfriend Emily and I were both raised in cities. I’m writing this from Berkeley, California, where we moved at the conclusion of our Maine apprenticeship. It feels as though we’ve been thrown like a boomerang from our metropolitan nuclei, out to the end of the earth, and now we’re back. We felt more useful bringing our farming knowledge home, so to speak, to a city, to explore the uncharted horizons of urban self-reliance. We have a vision of dozens of Good Life Centers springing up in areas of clustered housing, challenging the notion that living simply and sustainably requires geographic remoteness. We’re inspired by black and white photos of American kitchen gardens from the 1930s and 40s – the insurance salesman cultivating lettuces in his undershirt, the military wife harvesting tomatoes along the driveway…

Setting up kitchen gardens in concise and sometimes unorthodox ways to deal with the contours of backyards and apartment roofs is a re-emerging art. Lacto-fermenting vegetables into sauerkrauts, kim chees, and pickles has become a (much healthier) urban-foodie translation of putting up cans of dilly beans for the winter. The Nearings’ legacy of resourceful, frugal, and purposeful living does inform our urban lifestyles, and we can create networks and forums for unprecedented urban homesteading cooperation. Emily and I have not taken Eliot’s advice completely literally, but its spirit remains intact. Instead of growing for landowners, we’re helping them grow for themselves. America’s open-armed reception of residential farm figures like Michael Pollan, Rosalind Creasy, Fritz Haeg, and Amy Franceschini suggests that today’s transformative movement may be more of a Back to the Yard.

Photos 1 and 3 by Jeremy Oldfield
Photo 2 by Payton Chung

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!