Causing no end of difficulties in our national discourse is the steadfast belief held by both the right and the left that everything is either right or left: bad or good, strong or weak, despotic or patriotic.  You’re either with us or you’re against us.  President Obama addressed this very effectively before both House Republicans and Senate Democrats in recent days.  It is media driven to a large extent because the media need controversy to sell papers, or bytes or views or whatever it is they’re selling these days.

The most common form this takes is the old build’em-up-then-tear’em-down routine.  Perhaps the only thing many Americans enjoy more than the uplifting emotion of a success story is the schadenfreude of watching that success come tumbling down.  So when an idea comes to the fore, the critics ooze from the woodwork and their primary tactic is divide and conquer.  Label it, frame the debate, and the fight is won or lost before the story is even told.

For a long time in the circles I travel in this was not a problem because the ideas embodied in what some have come to call SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, & Ethical) were not perceived as a threat to the established paradigm.  Recent successes such as Michael Pollan’s work have, however, shined a very bright spotlight on advocates of real food.  As a result, people who have been toiling at these ideas for decades are becoming targets of powerful interests in the Big Food lobby.  Such is the case this week at WeeklyStandard.com, where Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has found his most recent audience.

Mr. Hurst was among the earliest vocal detractors of Mr. Pollan’s work, as well as that of anyone who might find flaw in agroindustrial model.  His essay last summer, titled The Omnivore’s Delusion, did an excellent job of exploiting Pollan’s success to rally the big corporate agriculture interests against the perceived threat of critics both in the media and in the field.  It’s natural: he felt attacked and he responded, and has now done so again.  Unfortunately Mr. Hurst’s vitriol, then as now, only serves to fan the flames of a fire that needn’t be burning.  Individuals on neither side of the debate are inherently evil, in fact both want the same thing: healthy food for all.  Since our ideas for how to accomplish this differ, we are immediately cast into the right and left corners and told to come out fighting when the bell rings.

Of course this is not a new phenomenon.  City and country folk have mistrusted each other since the beginnings of civilization (which, it bears pointing out, came into being because of agriculture).  Nonetheless our society has changed enormously in the last 100 years.  Where once nearly everyone lived on a farm or had an immediate relative who did, today only 2% of the population lives in rural America.  It’s not a surprise that when the 2% senses criticism emanating from within the other 98% they’re going to feel a bit nervous.  Some of the critiques in fact even come from within the 2% (witness cattleman Will Harris in Georgia).  In his most recent essay though Mr. Hurst’s fears are misplaced, and he remains little more than a tool for moneyed interests.

The essay suffers from many errors of presumption as well as fact.  He contends that Kathleen Merrigan’s Know your Farmer initiative results from the idea that “America, it seems, has been operating at a knowledge deficit when it comes to farmers, and farmers lack the social skills to close the gap between eaters and producers of food.”  He is partially correct in that people in this country and throughout the Western world have become increasingly distanced from their sources of food, and we have become so to our detriment.  The second part of his statement though, a backhanded swipe at critics of industrial agriculture disguised as self-deprecation and designed to raise the ire of his fellow Farm Bureau members, is uninformed to say the least.  Not only are the farmers I know perfectly capable in the “social skills” department, both they and the rest of my friends in the movement to improve our food are working hard to close that gap.  Ms. Merrigan’s program is one of many tools.

While he correctly points out that the average age of farmers in America is 58, he misses the point that this means we are running out of farmers.  We actually now have more prisoners in America than farmers.  He goes on to put words in foodies’ mouths by claiming that we seem to think farmers are not sustainable.  Quite far from it, but many of the inputs many farmers use are not. These include the GMOs and chemical fertilizers that Farm Bureau and the Property and Environment Research Center he cites both adamantly advocate.  It’s not the farmers or even the farms that are unsustainable; it is the methods they have been railroaded into using by large corporate interests seeking markets for their chemicals since even before the early 70’s when Earl Butz and his “Get Big or Get Out” mantra took hold of American food.

The point is missed yet again when Mr. Hurst says:

In December, strawberries from California can be shipped to market in Canada with less total energy use than the locally grown crop. The food miles are greater, but the carbon footprint is smaller. True believers in the local food movement, of course, simply stop eating strawberries in winter. Their devotion is admirable, but a winter diet of freshly dug turnips and stored potatoes is hardly interesting.

I choose not to eat strawberries in the winter not because they come from far away but because they taste awful.  In my own restaurant, we stock everything feasible from local sources.  This does not mean, as Mr. Hurst would have it, that we have nothing but turnips and potatoes in winter, nor does it mean we forego oranges or olives because they don’t grow in Iowa.  Despite what he and his corporate-activist-supported friends at PERC might have you believe, the “SOLE” food movement is not a bunch of lefty Luddites, and that’s my main point (besides that I like turnips).  Not only does food I trust from people I know taste better for those reasons, it also keeps my dollars in my community.

Consider this: there are about 50,000 households in Johnson County Iowa, where I live.  If each of those households redirected just $10 of their existing weekly food budget toward buying something local, whether from the farmers market or a CSA or eggs from the farmer down the road, it would keep $26M in the local economy rather than it being siphoned off to China via Bentonville.  Now imagine the same thing in larger communities.  That’s not a left or right issue, that’s a hometown issue.

I must also point out Mr. Hurst’s use of the phrase “alleged global warming.”  It carries with it all the intellectual honesty of “alleged cancer from smoking.”

Agendas like those of Mr. Hurst, the Farm Bureau and PERC serve only the interests of the large corporations that fund them, not of the farmers whose toil fills their coffers.  Better to look to the like of the Practical Farmers of Iowa, who are truly concerned with the well-being of the food, the farms and the people on them.

This is not about rich v. poor, city v. country or smart v. dumb.  It’s not even I’m right and he’s wrong nor the reverse.  It’s that these issues are only important to those of us who eat, live and breathe on this planet.  It matters to those of us who have to pay for health care, and raise our children, and get and keep a job.  And the positions that the organization I work for, and many others take are not ones designed to attack farmers but rather to support them and all the people who are making food where it should be made: on farms and dairies, in breweries and wineries and vineyards and not in factories.

The article, entitled Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals, goes after the whole local food movement as a kind of effete endeavor by people who don’t know what they are talking about. And since the New York Times alerted its online readers to the article without digging much deeper, I will attempt to do so here.

Christopher Cook’s (Author, Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry Is Killing Us) response on the listserv Comfood to the Omnivore’s Delusion skillfully frames many problems with Blake Hurst’s letter.

Cook points out that Hurst conflates and confuses the personal with the systemic – mis-identifying his family’s hard work and integrity with an industrial food system that is blatantly unsustainable, exploitative, unfair, and without integrity.

Corporate disinformation and public relations campaigns have used this media relations strategy since the tobacco Industry’s pushback against anti-smoking campaigns of the late 1960s. The strategy attempts to demonize the debate by creating straw men to be knocked down by corporate messages.

Today such disinformation efforts easily deflect farmer attention away from global corporate monopoly control of the food system that dictates prices and production standards/procedures towards agri-intellectuals and supposedly “wacko” consumers who, in the recent words of a Michigan politician, want to give “chickens the right to drive.”

This reminds me of Dario Fo’s famous play “The Accidental Death of An Anarchist,” which ends with the police inspector saying something like, “Whenever we get too close to the truth, a good scandal can distract our attention.”

Again, as Cook has so wisely pointed out, Farm Bureau official Blake is acting rationally, given the public subsidies, monopoly corporate control and general power relationships of the current global food system. (And Tom Philpott over at Grist has done the digging, check out his response to the article.) In other words, he is not “crazy.” But neither are we.

So what do we do in response to this carefully crafted industrial food corporate counterattack of which this letter is just a part? Blake’s own words offer some clues.

Blake wrote, “Farmers can raise food in different ways, if that is what the market wants.” This acknowledgment should be at the heart of our discussion with conventional farmers who are trapped in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome relationship with the industrial food system. They have literally bet “the farm” on oil intensive, water intensive mono-crop production techniques dictated to them by global monopoly food corporations.

Today, consumers increasingly want food raised in ways that reflect and respect their values: local food production, humane treatment of animals, no antibiotics or hormones, and based on building healthy living soil.

These consumers choices are not a conspiracy, are not wacko acts, but a simple expression of the free market system dictum, “the customer is always right.” It is simply good business for farmers to change the way they farm. Wal-Mart stopped purchasing fluid milk produced with rBGH (a Monsanto developed hormone to boast milk production) simply because their customers demanded it.

Blake also wrote, “[Bill] McKibben is certain that the contracts these (CAFO) farmers sign with companies like Tyson are unfair, and the farmers might agree.” The words, “farmers might agree” is an understatement. Poultry and swine confinement farmers have repeatedly sued their “integrators” (the corporations that vertically control the industrial animal system) over the last decade.

At issue are confiscatory producer contracts that make the small family farmers virtual serfs on their own farms. For instance, small contract poultry producers actually supply over 50 percent of the capital necessary to keep Tysons and Perdue and their like operating – yet have no ownership stake in the corporation and face “blacklisting” if they don’t do as they are told.

I propose we stand with small farmers, now trapped in CAFO industrial contracts, who are fighting back and help them move to sustainable, humane, local food production.

Local seed laws and local animal treatment laws offer one path for consumers and farmers to cooperate in a community-effort to reform the food system. That is why industrial food corporations push so hard for state pre-emption of local control over these issues (the Monsanto laws).

One final point deals with farmer access to alternative information.

Blake’s letter contains a number of fundamental mistakes about the nature and effectiveness of “organic” farming processes and results. Unless farmers can have access to the truth about ecologically intelligent farming, they will remain captives of the industrial system.

The Rodale Institute, with its New Farm publication and extensive website, offers information about effective, science-based alternatives to industrial farming processes. We need to support outreach campaigns by institutions like Rodale to help farmers and consumers alike.

As Fred Kirschenmann points out, “a food system based on cheap oil, surplus water, and stable climate is not sustainable. We all are going to have change or relationship to food production, whether we want to or not.”

Let’s help small and mid-size farmers like Blake Hurst escape the industrial system – rewarding their courage and hard work, offering them informational and policy support for a transition to sustainable agriculture, and making fun of AEI’s attempts to demonize the debate.

If you’ve been listening to the news in the past month, you’ve probably heard quite a bit about biofuels. Simply put, they are fuel made out of plants – principally corn and soybeans in the United States.

The new Obama administration is solidly in favor of increased biofuels production. Everyone from his Secretary of Agriculture to his Secretary of Energy has voiced their support for this policy. But the production of biofuel is by no means uncontroversial, and solidly at the center of this controversy is Dr. David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agricultural Sciences at Cornell University.

Dr. Pimentel was born on a large farm in California’s central valley, and he later moved to a smaller farm in Middleboro, Massachusetts. After his graduate work in entomology at Cornell and post-doctoral work at Oxford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago, Pimentel got a break when paper on the “life cycle analysis” of corn production was accepted by the journal Science in 1970. He’s been increasingly involved with agricultural issues ever since, and has become one of the most outspoken critics of both industrial farming methods and biofuel production. On both counts, he has published numerous papers demonstrating that modern agricultural technology uses more energy, is more toxic, and provides less benefit to a world of hungry consumers.

Some of his findings are:

1) According to recent analysis, it takes 143% more energy to make one gallon of ethanol than is contained in the ethanol itself.

2) If the entire United States corn crop were used for fuel, it would replace a mere 4% of US oil consumption.

3) One of the possible replacements for corn ethanol is called cellulosic ethanol – made from plant stalks, corn husks and other agricultural waste – but this material is even less efficient than corn and takes even more energy to produce.

4) It currently requires 1,700 gallons of water to produce each gallon of ethanol (mostly to grow the corn.)

His most recent paper Pimentel D et al. Food versus biofuels: environmental and economic costs, published in the journal Human Ecology, is as scathing an indictment of the effects of biofuel policy as a scientific paper can be. He and his coauthors conclude, “Growing crops for biofuel not only ignores the need to reduce fossil energy and land use, but exacerbates the problem of malnourishment worldwide.”

Ironically, in the recent economic environment ethanol production is starting to look a little less rosy for the people who make it, as well. A recent New York Times article details how the “goals lawmakers set for the ethanol industry are in serious jeopardy.” While new ethanol plants were recently being built as fast as possible, the article continued, “the industry is burdened with excess capacity, and plants are shutting down virtually every week.”

I recently caught up with Dr. Pimentel to see what all the fuss was about.

Dr. Pimentel, did you have any idea that this work was going to strike such a strong chord when you did this research a few years ago?

No, I didn’t but that’s what happens when you get mixed up with politics and big money.

But you’ve been working on biofuel issues for quite a few years?

Yes, more than 20 years.

And you’ve gotten some news for your work, but it seems like people on the policy level haven’t listened to what you’ve been saying.

Well, were gaining on the system and getting more and more people to understand the situation, so that’s encouraging.

Have you been contacted by the Obama administration?

Not really, no. And I’m a little disappointed by Obama right now, and the new Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack and Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, and the Secretary of the Interior Salazar – they’ve all expressed support for Ethanol. And that position is clearly not supported by the research.

Can we back up – didn’t your scientific career start out in Entomology?

Yes, that’s true, I started by studying insects but I was an entomologist with broad interests.

So how did you progress from entomology to sustainable agriculture and biofuel research?

Well, I got involved with energy and agriculture back in the early 1970’s – and we published a paper in Science at that time. Fortunately they accepted it way back then.

And I’m really intrigued by your 2005 study about organic agriculture producing the same yields as conventional?

I’m really proud of that study published jointly with the people at the Rodale Institute.

But with all the current press I’ve seen about your current biofuel paper, I haven’t seen people making the connection between large agribusiness and the biofuel companies?

Well, they all work together to keep the system of subsidies and dependence going. For example, the big chemical companies have definite interests in keeping the chemicals going, and in fact that’s what genetic engineering is about, especially the herbicide resistance. That’s been put into soybeans and corn – in fact 75% of both those crops are now herbicide resistant. And these are the crops that people want to use for fuel. All this does is waste energy and promote the use of herbicides that the chemical companies are most interested in selling.

So that’s what this business is all about. It’s not increasing the yield of corn or soybeans at all, it’s increasing the use of herbicides in soybeans and corn.

And recently I’ve seen advertising that they are making drought resistant GE crops to increase yield, but from what I understand there aren’t any proven crops that are drought resistant?

That is true. When they say they are drought resistant, what they mean is that the crop can wilt better than a conventional crop. But if you look at it, it still takes the same quantity of water to produce the same quantity of corn whether they are drought resistant or not.

In other words, it still takes about 700,000 gallons of water to produce an acre of corn whether it is drought resistant or conventional corn.

So Monsanto’s claim to be able to have a drought resistant corn in the next few years is all talk?

Yes, that’s right.

Do you follow the debate about organic farms with GMO seeds, saying that there isn’t any conflict between organic agriculture with genetically modified seeds?

I don’t agree with the genetically modified organisms, but I am glad that more people are interested in organic and are supporting it.

I certainly don’t want to propose that all organic is going to solve all our problems. There are significant problems with some of our crops – like potatoes, and apples, and oranges and so forth – that have serious pest problems that have to be dealt with.

But the corn and soybeans that we have studied and published in Bioscience was a very fortunate combination. We achieved the same yields of corn and soybeans over a 22 year period, comparing organic with conventional fields. That is very encouraging – using no nitrogen fertilizer, and no insecticides, and no herbicides in this study.

It shows that it can be done, and that we don’t need genetic engineering or chemicals to do it.

Are you following the current drought situation here in the US?

Yes, I have been following it, and it’s also terrible in Australia, too.

Yes, and also in China and South America.

They are having problems as well. But according to the climatologists, this is a normal amount of precipitation that we’re going to have to get used to. Of course, I hope we go back to the abnormal levels we’ve been having. There’s no question that we need more water.

And again, I emphasize, to grow an acre of corn for the growing season of three months uses 700,000 gallons of water, and that’s an enormous amount of water. Very few people appreciate the amount of water that is required by agriculture.

Out in California, you might have a better appreciation than we do back in the East.

Perhaps more than some. Here in California, it looks like we are going to be forced to drastically reduce our agricultural output this year due to water shortages, and California produces 50% of the national’s row crops. So it’s going to greatly affect our overall food resource in this country, and probably raise prices even in this depressed economy.

Yes, that’s true. So in this economy and environment it’s not a time to grow more crops for fuel. That’s my main point that I’m trying to make. Each gallon of ethanol requires 1,700 gallons of water to produce – we just can’t keep that up.

Did you see the recent USDA Census of Agriculture Report, indicating an increase in the number of small and organic farms?

Yes, and while it is true that the larger farms are producing most of the food, I’m still very supportive of the smaller farms because I was born and brought up on a small farm, so I’m biased. But I think they have a place, and should have a place, and I’m pleased to see that organic is growing.

What do you think is the future of sustainable agriculture?

When you say sustainable, what do you mean?

Exactly! That’s my question for you – what do you mean when you use the term? In general people don’t have a clear definition of that term.

Well, unfortunately, it means everything to everybody.

Do you have a personal definition?

Organic. It’s a simple clear term, if you’re talking about producing crops in an environmentally sound and energetically sound way. And I don’t want to indicate that all organic is easy and successful, because it’s not. But there are some crops such as the corn and soybeans, which are the two major crops in the United States, where organic can be used and be effective.

Photo: jurvetson