High Food Prices, Endless Circles

An article by Mark Winne, the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (Beacon Press) was sent out by Foodforethought.  It’s side title “Just Another Bad Day in the Foodline” certainly emphasizes the way the human mind works – i.e. endless circles.  It seems that we never do address the root causes of poverty or food insecurity, we really just skirt around it.  

 

Mark Winne states:

“For another class of American shoppers, however, rising food prices, whether organic or conventional, are just another bump in the road on an already trying journey. I’m speaking of low-income families, and increasingly low-to-middle income families who now find themselves treading closer to the lower end of the income spectrum.”

Conventional food prices and possibly organic ones too are getting more expensive (though Hewitt’s prices haven’t increased noticeably at the Big Carrot shelves).  Just the other day I walked into Valu-Mart and regular 2% skimmed milk was more than 40 cents more expensive.  I remembered for years how the price was always $4.69.  Now it looked like $5.30 something.  That’d definitely hurt people on tight budgets who have many mouths to feed.  

 

Of course that sort of issue runs right in parallel with the fact that food is TOO cheap.  Any poverty advocate might smack me for saying that.  Of course they might also point out that housing is TOO expensive.  It’s an unbalanced equation.  Then we realize that our society spends too much on technological toys and not enough keeping itself happy and healthy.  

 

“In our nation’s schools, food service directors are scrambling like never before to feed millions of children who are eligible for federally funded child nutrition programs. But with barely one dollar per meal to pay for the food portion of school lunch, our redoubtable lunch ladies are consulting scripture for recipes that turn stones into bread.”

 

Meanwhile it becomes harder to fix this massive gap in thinking and in pocket books.  Recent work by the Centre for Canadian Policy Alternatives has highlighted the growing rich poor gap here in Canada.  People just aren’t being paid enough.  A small elite are literally drinking the masses dry like vampires.  What can anyone really do about this incredible extreme?  Can you fix something this unbalanced?  

 

Mark Winne had a lovely conversation that demonstrates this point:

“I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a county food stamp director who was confused by the growth in food stamp applications in spite of the county’s record low unemployment levels. The recently opened Wal-Mart Supercenter and a separate Wal-Mart regional distribution warehouse had provided hundreds of jobs to county residents. But to his chagrin, the county director realized that Wal-Mart’s wages were so low, that many of their workers still qualified for food stamps. Public funds, i.e. the U.S. taxpayer, were subsidizing the nation’s biggest retailer.”

 

Competition and exploitation exists in nature.  I’m not quite sure it was meant to go this far.  Literally.  I haven’t even mentioned sweat shops in the third world either.  

 

Mark like many others including myself realize that policies have to be used to fix this.  There is of course just one problem – our policy makers are literally in bed with (if not actually) the rich and powerful elite who don’t want it any other way.  Can you blame them?  Whose willing to give up endless wealth after all?  How do you fight this side of human nature?  This psychology, this culture?  

 

Hmm…  If we walk off, enjoy our little lives it never stops (at some point it reaches us).  If we act and not everyone’s with us we can’t win as much as we’d like.  We could wait for a crisis and play Russian roulette (I’m talking food riots, climate change, flooded coastal cities and increasing weather related disasters – yes, the stats are out there for those who want to see it, naysayers or otherwise).  

 

If you’ve ever read the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein or even the works of Charles Darwin, then disaster is usually the test.  It’s the test to see who’s got the right ideas and the right bodies to adapt in the new situation.  One might hope it never gets to that point.  Oh well, it’s time to play.

 

Mark Winne’s article can be found at :  http://foodforethought.net (or I can send you the original)

 

Threads of Wrath: Stirring the Fibres of Fairness

For those in Toronto…  I will pass this along:

Threads of Wrath: Stirring the Fibres of Fairness, is a documentary on different conceptions of fairness in the cotton trade in Burkina Faso, a small French speaking country of West-Africa. It focuses on the daily interaction between cotton producers and the SOFITEX, a large state company with a regional buying monopoly, and puts it side by side with different Western conceptions of trade justice. Come out to learn how 6-month payment delays and quality control corruption in the fields relate to the growing and popular Fair Trade movement!

 

There will be THREE screenings of the film:

 - May 16th from 7-9pm

 - May 17th from 7-9pm

 - May 25th from 4-6pm

 

 at the Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Road (just south of Dundas), in the Alterna Room on the 4th floor. Each screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Émanuèle Lapierre-Fortin, a recent U of T graduate who spent 10 months working in Community Economic Development in Burkina Faso and wrote her honours thesis on Fair Trade Cotton. Freshly roasted fair trade coffee (the best you’d ever have!) and samosas will also be served!

 

 This event is a fundraiser to support the efforts of the Trade Justice Education Network, which engages high school students and community groups in issues of trade justice and encourages them to take meaningful action. The suggested donation is 10-20$.

 

 Feel free to invite your friends!

Food Waste: Canada $3-5+ billion, UK $10+ billion per year?

 

 

Apparently, the British throw out a lot of food.  Enough to cost them $10 billion British pounds per year ($15.5 billion Canadian dollars).  My previous work on food waste for urban agriculture estimated that Canadians threw out at least 7-14 million tonnes of food.  If I do some more rough estimates then Candians lose at least $3-5 billion per year conservatively on wasted food.  

 

If this waste were recovered we could prevent the release of roughly 9-15 million tonnes of greenhouse gases for Canada (the weight of 76-127 CN Towers) and 18 million tonnes for the UK (the weight of 152 CN Towers).  Yet we seem to waste as much food as the Brits (they waste 6 million tonnes).  The Canadian $ and greenhouse gas values could be equal to or greater than the British cost.  Regardless, that’s quite a lot of money and climate changing emissions.

 

Last I checked, people in the UK wasted 30% of their home pantries (most of it being unopen and uneaten food).  The information I have indicates it’s roughly the same here in Canada (ranging from 20-30% depending on your local area).  Unfortunately we don’t have a campaign like the UK government’s Waste & Resources Action Programme.  There just aren’t enough hard numbers.  Anyone feel like starting a food waste study?

 

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What a waste: Britain throws away £10bn of food every year

Global food shortages, soaring prices and alarm over the environment. But every day, Britain throws away 220,000 loaves of bread, 1.6m bananas, 5,500 chickens, 5.1m potatoes, 660,000 eggs, 1.2m sausages and 1.3m yoghurts

 

By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent

Thursday, 8 May 2008 

 

A new study has exposed the staggering amount of food thrown away every day by the British public, calculating that the annual total of wasted products adds up to a record £10bn.

 

Each day, according to the government-backed report, Britons throw away 4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 5,500 [CORRECTED] chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products – whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded.

 

The roll call of daily waste costs an average home more than £420 a year but for a family with children the annual cost rises to £610.

 

The Government’s waste campaign Wrap (Waste & Resources Action Programme) revealed the extent of Britain’s throwaway food culture after sifting through the dustbins of 2,138 people who signed up to an audit of food detritus. Other items on the daily list included 1.2 million sausages, 710,000 packs of chocolate or sweets, 260,000 packs of cheese, 50,000 milkshake bottles and 25,000 cooking sauces.

 

The study is published as millions of the world’s poor face food shortages caused by rising populations, droughts and increased demand for land for biofuels, which have sparked riots and protests from Haiti to Mauritania, and from Yemen to the Philippines. Last month India halted the export of non-basmati rice to ensure its poor can eat, while Vietnam, the second-biggest rice exporter, is considering a similar measure after Cyclone Nargis ripped through Burma’s rice-producing Irrawaddy delta.

 

In Britain yesterday, it emerged that food prices had risen by 4.7 per cent in the past month. The soaring cost of wheat has increased food prices in the UK by up to 11 per cent in the past year, putting more pressure on domestic budgets already struggling to cope with higher mortgage costs and council tax and energy bills.

 

Wrap suggested households seeking to balance their finances could save money by following basic tips to prevent food waste, such as planning shopping trips better and keeping a closer check on use-by dates. It also pointed out that many people do not know the difference between a “best before date”, which has no implications for food safety, and use-by data, which must be followed.

 

The Environment minister, Joan Ruddock, said: “These findings are staggering in their own right, but at a time when global food shortages are in the headlines this kind of wastefulness becomes even more shocking. This is costing consumers three times over. Not only do they pay hard-earned money for food they don’t eat, there is also the cost of dealing with the waste this creates. And there are climate- change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin. Preventing waste in the first place has to remain a top priority.”

 

Eliminating the huge level of food waste would have significant environmental consequences. Local authorities spend £1bn a year disposing of food waste, which leads to the release of methane, a potent climate-change gas. Wrap calculated that stopping the waste of good food could reduce the annual emission of carbon dioxide by 18 million tonnes – the same effect as taking one in five cars off the roads.

 

Food experts said the study should serve as a wake-up call to British consumers. As well as an individual “Victorian moral” effort, Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, called for the Government to take action to improve the efficiency of the food system to face up to the challenges of climate change, rising oil costs and water shortages. Describing modern supermarkets as “cathedrals of waste”, he said: “The British food economy is one of the most wasteful it would be conceivable to design. We have to create a new set of criteria on what we want the food economy to address; it’s time for politicians to catch up.”

 

Previously, Wrap’s Love Food, Hate Waste campaign put the financial cost of the 6.7 million tonnes of food discarded annually in the UK at £8bn. After interviewing 2,715 households – and then analysing the contents of most of their bins – researchers found that people were throwing away a greater proportion of edible, unused products. Rather than half new food and half peelings and scrapings from plates, the proportion of entirely unused products was 60 per cent by weight and 70 per cent by value.

 

Overall, that meant the total level of waste was £2bn higher, at £10bn, with the untouched products discarded worth £6bn. Of those, products worth £1bn were still “in date”, Wrap found.

 

Launching The Food We Waste report, Wrap’s chief executive, Liz Goodwin, described its findings – which mean that one in three shopping bags is dumped straight in the bin – as “shocking”.

 

She said: “People aren’t really aware that we are wasting so much food; do we think it’s acceptable to throw so much away when people around the world are starving? But also with the economic situation here purse strings are getting tighter yet the average family with children is wasting more than £600 a year on food waste. It begs some questions which we all need to ask ourselves. As individuals we are all wasting food. By class or age, there isn’t much difference in how much we waste.”

 

‘I chuck out a lot because I live on my own’ 

 

Andrew Small, 46, from London 

 

I waste a lot of stuff which goes way over its sell-by date. If you don’t shop that often like me there is a danger of things like milk and fruit and vegetables going off in the fridge.

 

Estimated waste per month: £30

 

Andreia Augusto, 35, from Portugal 

 

I mostly waste salads and vegetables from the fridge; and things like HP sauce, plus beans and lentils tend to get chucked out. It can happen almost without you noticing.

 

Estimated waste per month: £50

 

Lisa Jennings, 26, from London 

 

I throw away a lot because I live on my own and I like to cook each night instead of eating ready-made meals. I struggle with vegetables because I tend to buy them in big packets.

 

Estimated waste per month: £20

 

Alaria Alongi, 40, Italian, lives in London 

 

I recycle everything and do my own compost. When I make a surplus I tend to eat leftovers. I look forward to a day when you use your own large containers for buying rice and pasta.

 

Estimated waste per month: £0

 

Alan Young, 58, from London 

 

I try to avoid throwing any food away, despite eating mainly at home. I was brought up by parentswho came from a wargeneration in which waste was a sin.

 

Estimated waste per month: £5-10

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/what-a-waste-britain-throws-away-16310bn-of-food-every-year-822809.html

Love Food, Hate Waste UK Campaign Hi-Res Logo

 

 

Taking Your “Natural” Rights Away (Act!): Bill C-51

“Health Canada is trying to pass Bill C-51 which is designed to take away our freedoms to treat, purchase and use natural health care products, vitamins, supplements, herbs (whether in your backyard, or from a store), teas, natural body products, (they are extending their definitions to include pretty much everything, as well as extending their definition of ’selling’ to mean anything you give, provide, (meaning even to your children). This will effect our abililty to give and treat ourselves, our children, friends, family and clients (if you are a practitioner) with natural means. This bill is moving faster than any other bill to date, as most bills take months to pass, this one is moving in a matter of weeks – once it its the third signing, it will be passed.”

 

PLEASE TAKE ACTION and SPREAD THE WORD to protect your current right to use the foods, herbs, supplements, and therapies:

 

1. visit: http://www.stopc51.com  and read Bill C-51 and/or the analysis

          to form your own opinion about whether this law is good for you

          or for your country

2. sign this petition and pass the word to your friends, family, anyone

           who cares

3. write, phone, email your MP 

 

4. http://www.stopc51.com/c51/what_you_can_do.asp

Thanks again for your considerate aid!

Sunny Lam

 

http://www.linkedin.com/in/sunnylam

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(NaturalNews) A new law being pushed in Canada by Big Pharma seeks to outlaw up to 60 percent of natural health products currently sold in Canada, even while criminalizing parents who give herbs or supplements to their children. The law, known as C-51, was introduced by the Canadian Minister of Health on April 8th, 2008, and it proposes sweeping changes to Canada’s Food and Drugs Act that could have devastating consequences on the health products industry.

 

Among the changes proposed by the bill are radical alterations to key terminology, including replacing the word “drug” with “therapeutic product” throughout the Act, thereby giving the Canadian government broad-reaching powers to regulate the sale of all herbs, vitamins, supplements and other items. With this single language change, anything that is “therapeutic” automatically falls under the Food and Drug Act. This would include bottled water, blueberries, dandelion greens and essentially all plant-derived substances.

 

The Act also changes the definition of the word “sell” to include anyone who gives such therapeutic products to someone else. So a mother giving an herb to her child, under the proposed new language, could be arrested for engaging in the sale of unregulated, unapproved “therapeutic substances.” Learn about more of these freedom-squashing changes to the law at the Stop51.com website:http://www.stopc51.com

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New enforcement powers allow Canadian government to seize your home or business

 

At the same time that C-51 is outlawing herbs, supplements and vitamins, it would grant alarming new “enforcement” powers to the (thugs) enforcement agents who claim to be “protecting” the public from dangerous unapproved “therapeutic agents” like, say, dandelion greens. As explained on the www.Educate-Yourself.org website ((http://educate-yourself.org/cn/canadian…), the C-51 law would allow the Canadian government’s thugs enforcement agents to:

 

%u2022 Raid your home or business without a warrant

%u2022 Seize your bank accounts

%u2022 Levy fines up to $5 million and a jail terms up to 2 years for merely selling an herb

%u2022 Confiscate your property, then charge you storage fees for the expense involved in storing all the products they stole from you

 

C-51 would even criminalize the simple drying of herbs in your kitchen to be used in an herbal product, by the way. That would now be categorized as a “controlled activity,” and anyone caught engaging in such “controlled activities” would be arrested, fined and potentially jailed. Other “controlled activities” include labeling bottles, harvesting plants on a farm, collecting herbs from your back yard, or even testing herbal products on yourself! (Yes, virtually every activity involving herbs or supplements would be criminalized…)

 

There’s more, too. C-51 is the Canadian government’s “final solution” for the health products industry. It’s a desperate effort to destroy this industry that’s threatening the profits and viability of conventional medicine. Natural medicine works so well — and is becoming so widely used — that both the Canadian and American governments have decided to “nuke” the industries by passing new laws that effectively criminalize anyone selling such products. They simply cannot tolerate allowing consumers to have continued access to natural products. To do so will ultimately spell the destruction of Big Pharma and the outdated, corrupt and criminally-operated pharmaceutical industry that these criminally-operated governments are trying to protect.

 

Everything You Need to Know About Eating

Pay for better quality and eat less.  I totally agree.  Michael Pollan’s latest book “In Defence of Food” presents an easy to follow way of living that keeps your mind sharp, your body strong and truly challenges your spirit.  Another book to examine is “The Warrior’s Diet” by Ori Hofmekler.  Some of the ideas from that dovetail nicely with Michael Pollan’s work.  In fact, both of them make mention of the Greeks and Romans.  Eat mostly vegetables and save the real, full meal for the end of the day.  The energy from that feast should carry you through to the end of the next day.  

 

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Everything you need to know about eating

 

Chow down like the Greeks, steer clear of the supermarket. A Coles Notes guide to Michael Pollan’s latest book

 

ANDRE PICARD

 

From Thursday’s Globe and Mail

 

May 1, 2008 at 9:31 AM EDT

 

‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

 

With those seven simple words, author Michael Pollan sums up pretty well everything you need to know about eating and good health.

 

In his recently published, brilliant book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, he argues convincingly for a return to simplicity.

 

Today, Mr. Pollan says, we are eating less and less food, and more and more “edible foodlike substances” – all manner of processed foods.

 

Americans – and, to almost the same extent, Canadians – are the most food-obsessed culture on Earth, fretting incessantly about the health consequences of food choices.

 

Mr. Pollan says this has created a nation (or two) of orthorexics – people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

 

Just look at newspapers, magazines, books and Food TV. They are loaded with articles and shows about the benefits of food’s various parts, or more specifically its components, like omega-3s to prevent Alzheimer’s, lycopene as an antioxidant, and monounsaturated fat as a cholesterol buster.

 

In other words, we speak no more of foods, but of nutrients.

 

Mr. Pollan labels this reductionist view of what we put in our mouths (and stomachs) nutritionism. In the ideology of nutritionism, foods are the sum of their nutrient parts.

 

To which Mr. Pollan’s reply is: Nonsense.

 

In Defense of Food says that, on the contrary, what matters is food in all its glory.

 

His earlier book The Omnivore’s Dilemma was all about the ecological and ethical dilemmas of our eating choices. His thesis was that our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.

 

In Defense of Food, published in January, is the logical next step and answers the question: Okay, what should I eat?

 

Mr. Pollan’s response, as stated above: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

 

But in a volume of 244 pages, he has room to elaborate.

 

The book is definitely worth reading and digesting in its entirety, but here is the Coles Notes version:

 

Eat food

 

Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize. Dump the processed food and don’t eat anything that’s incapable of rotting.

 

Avoid products that contain ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable or more than five in number. These are all markers of highly processed foods.

 

Avoid products that make health claims. While this may seem paradoxical, to make a health claim a food product must have a package.

 

Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle aisles. Dairy, produce, meats and fish line the walls, while processed foods are in the middle.

 

Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. Shop at a farmers’ market.

 

Mostly plants

 

Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists disagree on which nutrients in plants are best, but they all agree that plants are healthy eating.

 

You are what you eat eats, too. The diet of animals has a bearing on the quality of food they produce. It’s worth looking for pastured animal foods.

 

If you have space, buy a freezer. Buy fresh foods in season and in quantity, and freeze them.

 

Eat like an omnivore. The greater the variety of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.

 

Eat well-grown food from healthy soils. This is a more precise way of saying eat “organic,” a term that has been perverted.

 

Eat wild foods when you can.

 

Be the kind of person who takes supplements. Popping vitamin pills doesn’t appear to be very useful (with some notable exceptions like folic acid and perhaps vitamin D), but people who take them are more health-conscious, educated and affluent, and tend to eat better.

 

Eat more like the French, the Italians, the Japanese, the Indians, the Greeks. Those in traditional food cultures eat much better than those with a contemporary Western diet.

 

Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism.

 

Don’t look for a magic bullet in a traditional diet.

 

Have a glass of wine with dinner.

 

Not too much

 

Pay more, eat less. Choose quality over quantity.

 

Eat meals. Don’t graze.

 

Eat at a table. Not a desk. Not in a car. Not in front of the TV.

 

Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.

 

Try not to eat alone.

 

Consult your gut. Practise a principle that Okinawans call hara hachi bu – eat until you are 80-per-cent full.

 

Eat slowly.

 

Cook and, if you can, plant a garden.

 

There is nothing too difficult here. It’s a lot of common sense.

 

As Mr. Pollan notes wryly, no animal other than humans needs professional help in deciding what to eat.

 

It is a sad symptom of our confusion about food that we need to consult a nutritionist, a physician, a government food pyramid or – horror of horrors – a journalist on such a basic question.

 

apicard@globeandmail.com

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080501.wlpicard01/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home

Turning Lawns Into Salad Bars

The Edible Estates project by Fritz Haeg is yet another signal of things to come.  The increasing popularity of growing food in the urban realm is not a new idea having been around since at least 650 BCE (think of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon).  People like Fritz are changing the ideas of place and what goes where.  In a society that has forgotten what real cultivation and life is like, work like Edible Estates is a reminder that the earth, wherever it is found, is the source of all the food we have.  It is agriculture after all that allowed societies to flourish by providing enough energy for us to diversify into different professions. 

 

It is time to remember that fact and to realize that we can no longer require our farmers (who are only 2% of the population) to bear the burden of food production or the 70% of farmers in the rest of the world who we import from (while they go hungry because they earn so little they cannot buy their own food).  It is time we return to our roots.

 

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Excerpt:

Turning lawns into salad bars

Fritz Haeg campaigns to turn front lawns into incredible, edible yards

By Andrea F. Siegel

Sun reporter

April 14, 2008

Clarence Ridgley points out to a neighbor the herb patch, the baby broccoli plants surrounded by onions and his mini-orchard.

Nothing unusual. These are staples of a backyard garden.

But this is a front yard in Baltimore. Drivers slow to stare. All the sturdy single-family houses from the 1920s and 1930s on this city street west of Druid Hill Park line up behind their green lawns. Except, now, Clarence and Rudine Ridgley’s red brick and clapboard home is behind fruit trees, tomato cages, berry bushes and vegetables.

“I could do a lot with those fresh herbs,” says Kendall Ricks, 49, a neighbor who works as a chef.

“I am going to have to keep an eye on him,” teases Clarence Ridgley.

This is art – designed as food for thought, not only for the stomach.

For creator Fritz Haeg, the Ridgley house is the sixth installment in his ongoing project called Edible Estates, an agricultural experiment that is as much about people as it is about plants. It is an architectural-artistic-environmental-landscaping-social-political challenge that has homeowners swapping out grass for greens, a lawn for lunch.

Haeg is a Los Angeles-based architect by profession and an activist gardener by choice. His book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, was just published and the Whitney Museum in New York is featuring his work as part of its biennial.

Edible Estates has degrassed front yards since 2005, starting in Salina, Kan., nearly the geographic center of the United States. From there Haeg moved on to London and Maplewood, N.J., among other cities, before coming to Baltimore as part of the Contemporary Museum’s Cottage Industry, which features six artistic expressions that take place on sites in the community. Set to open May 31, the exhibit will chronicle the Ridgley’s yard with photographs as it grows.

What Haeg is proposing around the country – around the world – is nothing short of seditious in many a community:

Forget the monoculture vanity lawn that seals you, the homeowner, from the public and looks like every other useless patch of green upon which people expend time, money and chemicals. Instead, establish an organic harvestable landscape out front, with fruiting trees and vining vegetables, from which you, the locavore (those who favor food grown within their region), can feed your family.

“A lawn cuts across all social and political strata. It’s our common experience,” Haeg says.

But he wants people to rethink that….

andrea.siegel@baltsun.com 

 

Original Story:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/custom/today/bal-to.fritz14apr14,0,3995773.story

When Neighbors Become Farmers

Where front yards become places of bounty.  Of course there’s the matter of place and culture.  Many people have been taught that the green lawn is the only acceptable thing and when they see otherwise they find it offensive to their ideas of place.  Regardless, in the US and even here in Toronto there are people who bravely do what they believe in – and well, growing vegetables in the front yard is as benign as it gets.  

 

Frankly it is a liberating sight when that dirt has some fine, juicy tomatoes hanging on the vine of a plant.  A plant grown right before the eyes.

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Green Acres II: When Neighbors 

Become Farmers

Suburban Arugula Is Organic and Fresh, but About That Manure…

By KELLY K. SPORS

April 22, 2008; Page A1

 

BOULDER, Colo. — When suburbanites look out their front doors, a lot of them want to see a lush green lawn. Kipp Nash wants to see vegetables, and not all of his neighbors are thrilled.

 

“I’d rather see green grass” than brown dirt patches, says 82-year-old Florence Tatum, who lives in Mr. Nash’s Boulder neighborhood, across the street from a house with a freshly dug manure patch out front. “But those days are slipping away.”

 

Since 2006, Mr. Nash, 31, has uprooted his backyard and the front or back yards of eight of his Boulder neighbors, turning them into minifarms growing tomatoes, bok choy, garlic and beets. Between May and September, he gives weekly bagfuls of fresh-picked vegetables and herbs to people here who have bought “shares” of his farming operation. Neighbors who lend their yards to the effort are paid in free produce and yard work.

 

A school-bus driver, Mr. Nash rises at 5 a.m. and, after returning from his morning route, spends his days planting, watering and tending his yard farms and the seedlings he stores in a greenhouse behind his house.

 

Farmers don’t necessarily live in the country anymore. They might just be your next-door neighbor, hoping to turn a dollar satisfying the blooming demand for organic, locally grown foods.

 

INDEPENDENT STREET BLOG

 

mime-attachment1 

Kelly Spors on opportunities down on the yard farm.2 Read the latest post and share your thoughts.

 

Unlike traditional home gardeners who devote a corner of the yard to a few rows of vegetables, a new crop of minifarmers is tearing up the whole yard and planting foods such as arugula and kohlrabi that restaurants might want to buy. The locally grown food movement has also created a new market for front-yard farmers.

 

“Agriculture is becoming more and more suburban,” says Roxanne Christensen, publisher of Spin-Farming LLC, a Philadelphia company started in 2005 that sells guides and holds seminars teaching a small-scale farming technique that involves selecting high-profit vegetables like kale, carrots and tomatoes to grow, and then quickly replacing crops to reap the most from plots smaller than an acre. “Land is very expensive in the country, so people are saying, ‘why not just start growing in the backyard?’ “

 

Environmentalists embrace the practice because it cuts the distance — and the carbon dioxide — needed to get food from farm to consumer. It also means less grass to water and fertilize and fewer purely ornamental plants. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly a third of all residential water use goes to landscaping. Why not use it to grow food instead?

 

But for the neighbors, the new face of farming can have a decidedly ugly side. The sight of vegetable gardens — and the occasional whiffs of manure from front-yard minifarms — is not their idea of proper suburban living. Many homeowners associations ban growing food in the yard, believing it damages a neighborhood’s appearance and may ding property values.

 

Kris Rickert, 39, who lives with her husband and four-year-old son about a block from three of Mr. Nash’s front-yard farms, says she particularly doesn’t like looking at the farms when nothing is in bloom. “In the winter, it looks pretty yucky,” she says. Before they moved to the neighborhood two years ago, the Rickerts toured another house that was for sale where Mr. Nash had recently started farming the yard. “I just kept thinking about how I’d have to tear it all up and plant grass again,” she says.

 

Still, for an increasing number of residents in the suburbs, it’s the reverse — turning grass into edible greens and maybe even greenbacks — that is proving so alluring.

 

Start-up costs for a one-eighth-acre farm run about $5,500, says Ms. Christensen of Spin-Farming. That includes a walk-in cooler to wash and store fresh produce, a rotary tiller and a farm-stand display. Annual operating expenses, including seeds and farmers-market stall fees, can add about $2,000. Such a farm can generate $10,000 to $20,000 in annual sales, she says. That’s “an entry point into farming to see if they have a talent for it,” Ms. Christensen says. “Those that do will eventually be able to expand and increase that income level quite substantially.”

 

Susan and Greg VanHecke planted a small, 6-foot-by-20-foot vegetable garden in the back of their house in Norfolk, Va., two years ago to help teach their two children to grow and eat more vegetables. Reaping a bumper crop last year, Mr. VanHecke asked the owner of a local restaurant called Stove for whom he once worked as a sous-chef, to buy vegetables. Soon, Mr. VanHecke was making weekly deliveries to the restaurant, averaging about $100 in sales per week. The VanHeckes have added another restaurant customer this year and are tearing up all their backyard flower beds to grow more vegetables.

 

They’re also trying to figure out how to more easily fit farming into their otherwise busy schedules. Even minifarms take a lot of time, and suburbanites with full-time jobs find themselves a little stretched.

 

The VanHeckes decided to be practical and replace their labor-intensive lettuce crop with easier vegetables. “My husband would come home from his all-day job [as a Navy officer] and snip leaves and wash them one-by-one,” says Ms. VanHecke, 43. “Things like tomatoes, you can just rinse them. You don’t have to spend your whole evening [on] them.”

 

Close quarters in suburbia and in inner-city neighborhoods pose other problems. Growing vegetables takes sunshine not always abundant in yards with shade trees. And protecting the soil is another challenge, as is keeping manure out of the house and off the sidewalk, especially when pets run loose. Mr. Nash sweeps dirt off the sidewalks, and has to remember to clean his dog’s paws each time she runs inside from the backyard.

 

Meanwhile, even modern yard farmers who know what they’re doing aren’t protected from the age-old bane of farming: nasty weather. One early frost or bad storm can wipe out a crop. A midsummer hailstorm in 2006 shredded Mr. Nash’s first attempt at farming yards. “It’s just one of those things you have no control over,” he says.

 

(Go to website to see video – caption: A growing number of suburban Americans are earning extra cash by growing food in their backyards. WSJ’s Kelly Spors reports.)

 

Write to Kelly K. Spors at kelly.spors@wsj.com3

 

URL for this article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120882472974233235.html

 

 

Hyperlinks in this Article:

(1) http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/04/22/entrepreneurs-see-opportunity-down-on-the-yard-farm 

(2) http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/04/22/entrepreneurs-see-opportunity-down-on-the-yard-farm 

(3) mailto:kelly.spors@wsj.com 

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120882472974233235.html

 

Many thanks as always to the Toronto Food Policy Council for forwarding this to me.