City Farming: the Growing Revelation

“Urban agriculture topples the myth that food production has to occur in wide-open spaces on large tracts of land. In fact, urban agriculture flies in the face of what usually has been done (and shown to be possible) in urban communities. Urban agriculture is part of a growing trend toward locally produced food, knowing where food comes from and who grew it.” (LaDonna Redmond, article below)

Growing food in the city isn?t really a new fad. When humans first made their settlements, food was produced nearby because we didn?t have trucks back in the old days.

Some may say that growing food has no place in the city. One can beg to differ however. People have a rich history of doing so (especially during the world wars). It is often crises that force us to change the way we see our cities.

It is crises that force us to say, ?Yeah it makes sense to grow food locally in our own backyard.? Then it is the plain green lawn that is out of style.

Are people ready to change their thinking? Well…

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Creating local food options in an urban setting
How one woman channeled her discovery about the perils of an industrial food system into creating local options for healthy, sustainably produced food in her own Chicago neighborhood.

By LaDonna Redmond

November 9, 2004: The word ?agriculture? evokes certain pictures that vary with the individual. A short drive outside of Chicago, fields and fields of corn or soybeans evoke one image. Barns and cows conjure up another. In more progressive circles, agriculture may mean food and small family farmers living close to the land.

Urban agriculture topples the myth that food production has to occur in wide-open spaces on large tracts of land. In fact, urban agriculture flies in the face of what usually has been done (and shown to be possible) in urban communities. Urban agriculture is part of a growing trend toward locally produced food, knowing where food comes from and who grew it.

Urban agriculture has been around for centuries. In 16th century Peru, a self-reliant urban agricultural system thrived in the Andes mountain city Machu Picchu. In 19th century France, biointensive agriculture fed local communities in urban centers.

Urban agriculture is about feeding people; it embraces the rights of farmers to produce food and the right of community to choose what they want to eat. Urban agriculture also embraces the concept of food sovereignty, a concept developed by V�a Campesina and introduced at the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996.

At a follow-up summit five years later, a group of NGOs described food sovereignty as ?the right of peoples, communities, and countries to define their own agricultural, labor, fishing, food, and land policies which are ecologically, socially, economically, and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances….?
Food sovereignty introduces a complete integration of social justice ideals that do not begin and end with food production but take into account every aspect of the system. It favors local food for local communities over food produced for import or export.

Bring it on home
My involvement in urban agriculture began with a simple wish to feed my son a healthy diet. After learning of his severe food allergies, I started to research the potential connection to food. I wanted to better understand what the proper diet for a 2 year old who was allergic to peanuts, shellfish, eggs, cheese and milk would look like! My research led me to the conclusion that the best diet for my son, and my whole family, would be a whole-foods diet with as little processed, packaged food included as possible.
Not realizing that I was asking a big question, I stumbled across some articles that mentioned genetically modified (GMO) food. However, when I examined food labels, no mention of GMOs could be found. How could this happen, and why was I not made aware of this? As I read further, I found out about industrial agriculture and all of its hazards. I was not prepared for the revelation that I knew very little about where my food came from or who grew it. Prior to this incident with my son, I would not have even considered the fact healthy and nutritious food has a lot to do with how that food was produced.
Closing in on a solution proved more difficult. Wallowing in the ?industrial agriculture in the country needs to change? mentality did not get the food on the table in my Westside Chicago neighborhood. I needed to gain access to food unpolluted by genetic engineering and free from pesticides. I needed organic food. Organic was not a new word to me; I had been exposed to the concept at the Midwestern college I attended. There were a few organic vegetable items in the local store?I remember the grey tinge on some carrots. They were not very appealing and hardly local.
My search for organic food in Chicago took me to grocery stores all over the city. On one of my long shopping excursions, I was disheartened to discover that I could not grocery shop in my own neighborhood. There was only one grocery store, and it did not carry organic food. On a visit to the produce section, I was shocked to find Boston lettuce at $3 a pound and heirloom tomatoes at $4.99 per pound. I quickly realized that we could scarcely afford organic food. I also wondered just how much effort it would it take to grow some lettuce and a couple of tomatoes (little did I know the ultimate ramifications of that simple question).
After some more research, my husband and I decided to convert our backyard into what we called a ?micro-farm.? My in-laws, who grew up on farms in rural areas, offered technical assistance. We grew lettuce, tomatoes, peas, squash, greens, cabbage, onions and a few herbs.
Then I decided to plant some corn. My father-in-law, Mr. Willie, looked amazed and proclaimed with authority, ?That?s not going to grow.? I asked him why, and he responded matter-of-factly, ?Corn won?t grow here in Chicago.?
Illinois is the leading state in soybean production and the second leading state in corn. One out of every four jobs in Illinois is agriculturally related. This is the Corn Belt. Surely, I thought, I can grow corn in Chicago. In defiance, I planted my kernels. I learned a lot about corn and planted two varieties, one hybrid and the other a native. The hybrid took; the native variety did not. I learned a new word: tassel. The tassel on the corn had to pollinate the silk, otherwise no corn will grow. Imagine that! I had no idea! One of my fellow gardeners told me to go out and gently shake my corn plants. Wacky as it sounded, I went out and shook all 20 of my corn stalks. By late August, Mr. Willie was the first to tell me that my corn was ready to pick. My husband, Tracey, had become a willing and even enthusiastic participant in this urban garden experiment. One day out of the blue, Tracey declared that he wanted to farm. Reluctant to give up all I knew about urban life, I looked around and saw that we could farm right where we were.

Sharing the wealth
Chicago is home to an estimated 70,000 vacant parcels of land. Mayor Richard M. Daley harbors a dream of creating the greenest city in the U.S. Well on his way to being the green mayor, Daley has developed a number of innovative environmental projects, including a roof-top garden on City Hall (where, of course, it?s always good to have a friend).
Urban farming and rural farming share some similarities. One, of course, is the goal to grow a product for consumption. The fundamental difference between urban agriculture and rural farming is land, specifically, the way in which that is acquired. Urban options include partnership with a municipal agency to gain access or outright purchase. The latter can prove to be very expensive, as land values in urban centers such Chicago are relatively costly. The lots that we acquire through our nonprofit, the Institute for Community Resource Development, we held in a trust by an organization called Neighborspace. Neighborspace holds the title to lots, and we have a management agreement for site usage.
As we developed the process to convert vacant lots to urban farm sites, supporting the local economy was a central theme. To achieve that end, we decided to at least try to use the time and talent of local community members as we developed the project. One of the ways the farm has consistently contributed to the local economy has been through hiring folks in our community to work on the farm sites. This work has included anything from short-term contracting, such as renting a Bobcat and hiring a driver to move compost, to hiring someone to plant and harvest vegetables for market.
As hard as we try, sometimes it isn?t possible to get everything from the community. In those cases, we have been able to identify other community based organizations to help us achieve our local economy goals. The inputs that make our vacant lots suitable to growing healthy produce are similar to those used to turn around abused farmland; they are simply applied in different quantities. To begin, we purchase good-quality compost by the truckload from a local urban farmer, Ken Dunn, director of the Resource Center. The Resource Center collects vegetable waste from local restaurants and turns it into compost. In the Chicago area, Dunn is known as the father of urban agriculture.
Before we could use the compost for the farm sites, we had to break up the heavily compacted soil. This could not be accomplished with a tiller; we used a backhoe to get the job done. The owner of the backhoe is a community member who owns a construction company.
University resources came in handy when figuring how to lay out the beds on the lots. An Extension agent from the University of Illinois helped us identify suitable plant varieties and with spacing. Because our project is done organically, we turned to local organic market producers to help with pest management and production. David Cleverton of Kinnikinnick Farms helped a lot by donating a couple of hundred tomato seedlings and then coming out to the urban farm sites to help us plant them.
We now have six lots and a refrigerated truck, and my husband Tracey is well on his way to realizing his dream of becoming a full-time farmer.
As we began working with urban agriculture, we realized that while the organic issue was important to us; locally grown, accessible food was even more so. Learning that our community was somewhat of a ?food desert? was a real eye opener. There was very limited access to quality produce such as organic. That our community did not desire this type of food was one of the many myths we shattered along our journey; that our neighbors were largely uneducated was another. Supporting the local Austin Farmes’ Market has been another way to build up the local economy.
The urban farm has inspired us to provide healthy, local, and sustainable food choices not only for our family but for our entire neighborhood. The food that we grow on the urban farm sites is sold at local farmers’ markets and, seasonally of course, at the neighborhood corner grocery store.
As we attempt to connect the food production of urban and rural communities, we see an opportunity to not choose urban over rural but to create a connection that highlights the value of both environments.
?Creating a systems approach related to urban agriculture is important,? says Orrin Williams, founder and president of the Center for Urban Transformation. (Williams is an environmental justice activist who has worked to close down toxic polluters on the West Side of Chicago.) ?Urban agriculture cannot exist in a vacuum,? he says.
?This project goes beyond mere gardening because the intent is to look at the comprehensive approach to the issue of developing local economies?hiring locally, selling locally. Using a food-system paradigm, we can see clearly how urban agriculture can improve access to high-quality food in communities like Austin.?

LaDonna Redmond is president of the Institute for Community Resource Development, a member of the Illinois Governor?s Advisory Council on Agriculture and Family Farms, and a 2003 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Fellow.

Keywords: urban agriculture, local food, environmental justice, community, sustainable food, family, food sovereignty, food security, equity, access, living

Picturing STUFF Big and Small

Oh to the madness of it. Oceans of plastic. Piles of cans. The artist Chris Jordan uses statistics and art to show us how overwhelming ?stuff? is like – both visually and in some ways mentally.

Presentations by the artist (the first one?s called Picturing Excess) can be found at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html or http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/02/13/greener-gadgets-video-of-artist-chris-jordans-keynote/.

From the ENN article at the very bottom:
?Each of us produces about 4.54 pounds of trash every day through our consumption and disposal habits. This amounts to 1657 pounds per person per year… The manufacturing industry alone sucks 1/3 of the energy and 13 percent of the water supply in the United States.?

?CELL PHONES? Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day

Depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005.

This picture is made up of cigarette packs (1100 Americans die from smoking per day – no one?s talking about it because of the media black out)

Depicts 65,000 cigarettes, equal to the number of American teenagers under age eighteen who become addicted to cigarettes every month.

213000 drug overdoses per year (1/3 are prescription medications; this picture is made out of a many Vicadin pills)

[Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.]

[these are just a few examples]

So on so forth. The talk about breast augmentation surgeries as a gift to girl college graduates. Many for under 21 ladies.

And so the stuff keeps mounting.

Chris claims: ?… we aren?t feeling enough… a kind of anesthesia… lost our sense of outrage, grief about what?s going on… about the atrocities going on in the world…?

A video to watch. Here?s to craziness (raises a pint glass of Bailey?s to that).

Jia jin.

Chris Jordan?s original website is http://www.chrisjordan.com

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From: Keep Green Going
Published March 21, 2008 12:21 PM

Good Things, Small Packages

The United States is the world?s top consumer nation. Americans spend about four times more per person than any other country. And let?s face it – we do it largely by shopping. On average, every American shops everyday for about 24 minutes. Per year, we spend somewhere around $4 trillion. That?s a lot of money. And think about this?� A new car is made every second, 2.3 million shoes are purchased every day and 2. 6 billion toys are bought every year. Through marketing and advertising (I should know, I work at an advertising agency) the psychology of shopping is embedded deep into our brains. The real question I always wonder – where does all that stuff go?
Each of us produces about 4.54 pounds of trash every day through our consumption and disposal habits. This amounts to 1657 pounds per person per year. That?s a lot of disposal. Also consider that every month 100,000 CDs are tossed and 50 million pounds of toothbrushes are scattered throughout the country?s landfills every year. It can easily be said that we?re a disposable society – we use tons of materials, water and energy to make the things we buy – only to discard of them later.

With over 6.6 billion people on this earth doing lots of buying, shopping poses a real threat. So where does all ?this stuff?� come from? It?s manufactured. The manufacturing industry alone sucks 1/3 of the energy and 13 percent of the water supply in the United States. With all this in mind, here are three simple steps from ?The Green Book?� to keep green going when shopping:

1. Minimal Packaging
If just 1 out of 10 products you bought had little or no packaging, it would eliminate more than 50 pounds of waste per household per year. This small reduction could also save you at least $30 annually, as $1 of every $11 you spend at the supermarket pays for the packaging of the products you buy. If every household did this, 5.5 billion fewer pounds of waste would enter landfills. This is enough garbage to cover all of New York City?s Central Park to a depth of 27 feet.
2. Go Paper
While both paper and plastic are not ideal choices at the checkout – baggers usually fill paper bags with more items than they do plastic bags. Also, paper bags can be easily reused. Moreover, paper bags have a better chance to being recycled.
3. Better Bathroom Tissue
If every household replaced just a single twelve-roll pack of regular bathroom tissue with a recycled variety, it would save almost 5 million trees and enough paper waste to fill 17,000 garbage trucks.

Portable Farms & Stylish Chicken Pens

Well here?s something convenient for a family without any farm training. A pair of social-environmental entrepreneurs, Colle and Phyllis Davis just created the Portable Farm (TM). It?s essentially a kit that?s relatively easy to put together to create your instant fish-vegetable greenhouse.

Here?s an excerpt from their press release:
?Help us break the cycle of poverty and feed the world or simply grow 400 heads of organic lettuce (or other table vegetables) and 100 pounds of home-grown fish in your own backyard in a 6 x 8 foot space.

A Portable Farm? requires no weeding or watering. Requires minimal water. No pesticides or fertilizers are necessary. It can be Solar Powered and fully automated. No hand feeding of fish is required. Upkeep time is three to five minutes a day.

Portable Farms? is scaleable for family, community, organizational or institutional installations, and can also be scaled for commercial growing. The fish and vegetables can be eaten or sold locally to stores or restaurants.

A Portable Farm? is a very simple system: A newly patented pump moves the water from the fish tanks and through a settling tank. From there, the water flows through shallow trays containing gravel where the vegetables are planted, and then the water flows back to the fish tanks. The new pump keeps the fish tanks free of sediments while it sends the nutrients to the plants.?

This is a similar yet bigger idea than Omlet UK?s Eglu mobile chicken pen. Well a bit bigger in terms of scope and diversity anyway. Omlet?s Eglu pen allows you to raise chickens, get lots of eggs and cut the grass all at the same time! How could you go wrong with that!

[Too bad urban bylaws (Toronto and elsewhere) are hampering this! A wonderful friend of mine, Carolyn Young is working on an urban chicken report - coming to a blog near you!]

Well I had wondered how to do something similar in Canada (grins). If another social-environmental entrepreneur is up for it, count me in! Maybe then I?ll put in some time and to help you make it happen!

Of course you can see there are some issues to trying to send these kits everywhere (think of the fuel costs – though I?m going to state for the record that that?s hardly a huge issue relative to eating too much meat or growing with too much chemical pesticides or fertilizers).

What?s important here is the concept of helping others get growing in a convenient way. Give them the the easy way in and then they?ll be inspired to learn more beyond the portable farm (so I pray).

Thank you Tanmayo Krupanszky (Canadian Organic Growers Toronto, Go Beyond Boundaries) for kindly forwarding this to me!

Sunny Lam

Organizer
FoodCycles
t: 416 845 0818
http://foodcycles.org
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sunnylam
“Growing vibrant soil, food and community.”

Green Noise, Wild Winds, Denials

It seems I?m always thinking about how the world is going to turn out. Some people tell me it?s a waste of time. They?re probably right. I?ve spent 19 years of life trying to figure it all out.

Now there?s these food crises and other problems (like bisphenol A, Teflon and worse). People are faced with climate change. Things seem enormous. Unstoppable.

It only makes sense that people would tune out or feel despair (oh yes, how I love wrestling with that one every day – mwahaha). An article by Worldchanging even looked at how environmental education (and messages and crises, etc) was socking kids in the stomach (emotionally). ?… environmental education research is strangely silent about dealing with the emotional implications of the environmental crisis on kids.?

There are ?a growing number of studies, such as those conducted by Dr. Albert Zeyer, a physician and health educator at the University of Zurich, demonstrating that high school students today are fully aware of the looming environmental crises, yet they feel powerless to change things.?

Furthermore, writer Alex Williams wrote an article in the New York Times about how the mass of green messages – real or misleading (green washing) are just starting to confuse people. Of course it?s no different than the rest of the marketing mess. People don?t want facts I?ve learned. No, they just want something to dull the pain of ?being?.

Ho ho.

It?s only the rare few ?enlightened? souls that thrive on facts. The rest just want to watch the shadows dance on the cave wall as Plato?s allegory of the cave would have it. Of course I know what rationality is like. It?s not a very comfortable place when the rest of the world is crazy in a self-destructive sort of way.

So what can we do about this? Besides better marketing (which I learned some recently at Tad Hargrave?s Radical Business Intensive workshop I might add – no doubt Tad will be thrilled that I blogged about him) – if there is such a thing, I?m not quite sure what else you can do.

Be authentic. Be you. Don?t nag. Don?t pester. (i.e. avoid making more green noise)

Be a shining example, a leader. Try your best to walk a good path (let others follow your example if they desire) and don?t judge others harshly. Treat people like people not children.

People are emotional beings. Treat people nicely. Friends will follow your lead, enemies will not.

?… And so let?s dance on the wild winds. Because everything?s going in circles. The world?s mad. Fight the good fight. Better to die standing than to die sitting.?

No soul?s got the answers to everything.

Farm Hands Down: Jenga Bricks

Mr. Sunny:  Here’s a sobering article by Tom Philpott of Grist Magazine on the seriously crippling farm labour shortage (can’t have local organic food without the people to grow it now can we?).  In fact, according to a recent CBC news story a few days back (on The National), London’s strawberry industry was being shot to hell.  Higher food prices were convincing migrant farm labourers to stay in their own countries where the pay was higher (due to the higher food prices, of course).  Strawberry harvests were literally rotting on the vine.  

 

Tom’s article isn’t specifically linked to strawberries alone or the higher food prices.  What he does talk about is being paid a living, sustainable wage.  It’s like we’ve siphoned all our resources from producing food, maintaining the land to do so or even maintaining people (our communities, our health, our contentment) and moved it all over to everything else (endless stuff as Annie Leonard would put it – see the 20 minute animation at http//www.storyofstuff.com/, how many techno gadgets do we really need?  it’s obvious that gluttony extends far past the palette).  

 

My best analogy:  a jenga tower.  We’ve been ripping out all the blocks from below while we’re standing on it (using a long reach mechanical arm made of jenga blocks) and putting them on top.  Soon we’ll be so top heavy it’ll all collapse like a house of cards.  Capiche?  How do you put the blocks back down (rebuild the infrastructure that you’re standing on)?  Are you willing to?  Are power hungry elites or bureacrats going to?  (mwahaha)

 

 

 

Our food crises may simply reflect our inability to control ourselves all the while striving to control everything and everyone else.  Oh ho, try doing some philosophy contemplations on that one!

 

Anyways, if you can’t fight this trend can we adapt?  What about urban farming (my past thesis work shows there’s lots of potential)?  If you build up it might be possible.  The fellow in my LinkedIn network, Dr. Dickson Despoimer, who I ran across during my work on urban agriculture came up with vertical tower farming (check out his site http://www.verticalfarm.com/).  

 

The mad thinker,

Sunny Lam

 

Ffenyx Rising

http://ffenyx.wordpress.com

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

 

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Farm Hands Down

To create a truly sustainable food system, we’ll have to confront the farm-labor crisis

BY TOM PHILPOTT

30 May 2008

When I think about what a truly healthy, vibrant food system would look like, I envision more farms: small farms serving specific communities, and diversified, midsized farms geared to supplying their surrounding regions. 

 

 

 

Many hands make site work.

 

Of course, there would still be interstate and global trade — you can’t grow olives or coffee in Iowa, or enough wheat in Florida to supply the state’s bakers. But with more farms across the nation, we could all generally eat much closer to home, consuming fewer resources and throwing off less pollution in the process. Traveling would be more interesting as well. Imagine finding region-specific, seasonal specialties — not standardized burgers — at train stations across the land. (Oh yeah, in my vision, there’d also be a high-functioning national rail system.) 

 

In some ways, this scenario — the food part, anyway — isn’t so far-fetched. I’ve watched people’s zeal to “eat local” rise dramatically over the past 10 years. And now, even the business media are taking it seriously. Just last week, BusinessWeek joined the chorus heralding the “Rise of the Locavore,” noting that, “Consumers increasingly are seeking out the flavors of fresh, vine-ripened foods grown on local farms rather than those trucked to supermarkets from faraway lands.” Nationwide, the number of farmers’ markets ballooned by 50 percent between 2001 and 2006, BusinessWeek reports. 

 

But consumer demand alone can only create so much change. Though the locavore movement is heartening and necessary, it remains a tiny organism compared to our great lumbering beast of an industrial food system. By some estimates, local-oriented farms supply something like 2 percent of U.S. food calories. To move beyond the farmers’ market box, farms producing for local and regional markets will have to multiply in number far more than that impressive 50 percent figure.

 

I’ve already identified one major obstacle between my reverie and reality: infrastructure. As I wrote in a recent column on the need to revive the dismal fortunes of midsized farms, the infrastructure needed for such farms to thrive — locally owned grocery stores, dairy-processing plants, slaughterhouses, canneries — has withered away as the food industry consolidated over the decades. 

 

In the weeks since that column, I’ve hit upon another roadblock: a growing labor shortage that’s falling particularly hard on midsized farms. 

 

Belaboring the Point

 

At first glance, New York would seem a particularly ripe state for a midsized farm renaissance. It boasts a bustling metropolis — the nation’s largest — with a strong and growing locavore scene. Combined with population centers like Albany and Rochester, the vast organism that is greater New York City might be expected to provide a robust market for the midsized farms that dot the state’s landscape.

 

Yet those very farms are struggling to harvest their produce because of an ongoing labor shortage. And produce unharvested means produce unsold — and farms in trouble. 

 

According to a recent New York Times piece, upstate farms are suffering because very few U.S.-born citizens will accept agriculture jobs — and the undocumented workers who have been staffing them for years are being hounded out by anti-immigration zeal. 

 

As a result, farmers are scaling back production of labor-intensive fruit and vegetable crops and investing heavily in labor-replacing machinery. Substituting human labor with machinery not only boosts agriculture’s fossil fuel use, it also makes farms more vulnerable by strapping them with debt. 

 

Not surprisingly, their lenders are getting nervous. In testimony last fall before the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, an official from Farm Credit of Western New York estimated that more than 800 farms in the state, representing 750,000 acres in farmland, were “highly vulnerable to going out of business or forced to [become] part-time farms from a severe labor shortage.” 

 

These operations, whose average size is less than 100 acres, essentially represent New York’s base of midsized farms. The Farm Credit official predicted that if those farms fail, much of that land would likely remain in some form of agriculture, but that “hundreds of thousands of acres would be vulnerable to being discontinued from crop production and converted to non-farm uses.” 

 

In other words, what’s left of New York’s most productive farmland may soon be sprouting second homes and vacation condos where it once produced tomatoes and green beans. 

 

U.S. Farms Migrate to Mexico

 

The problem is by no means limited to the Northeast. In California, the Associated Press reports, Mexican farmworkers are having trouble heading north over an increasingly well-patrolled border — but U.S. farm owners are crossing the other way freely. According to AP, “Many [U.S. growers have] moved their fields to Mexico, where they can find qualified people, often with U.S. experience, who can’t be deported.” 

 

When they jump the border to buy land — presumably without having to risk their lives in the desert or hire “coyotes” to ease the passage — U.S. farm owners find an oasis of cheap and compliant labor. AP reports that U.S. farm employers can buy a whole day’s worth of labor for a wage ($9.60) equal to an hour’s worth of work at the going rate north of the border — while still doubling Mexico’s minimum wage of $4.80 per day. 

 

Now, the AP article is talking mainly about large-scale agriculture here — the kind that keeps your local Wal-Mart stocked with little bags of baby spinach and asparagus all year. In the logic of industrial farming — where food is grown in vast, centralized monocrops, and then distributed in thousand mile-plus radii — the shift from California to Mexico makes a certain sense. “Mexico is closer to eastern U.S. markets than California,” Associated Press reports. “Shipping times to Atlanta are a day shorter from Mexico’s central Guanajuato state.”

 

But the labor crunch is surely also squeezing California’s midsized operations — the farms that will be needed to broaden local-food access in one of the nation’s most economically stratified states. In farm fields larger than even a few acres, diversified vegetable farming is extremely labor intensive — and in the modern U.S., farm labor generally means immigrant labor.

 

What, then, is the answer? In the short term, the U.S. should end its ridiculous nativist immigration policies. As I’ve written before, Mexican farmworkers don’t sneak across one of the globe’s most militarized borders to freeload off of U.S. taxpayers, despite the fantasies of certain cable-TV commentators. Rather, they’re fleeing a near-complete meltdown in small-scale Mexican agriculture — one that directly implicates the free-trade zeal of U.S. policymakers and corporations. 

 

But even if U.S. policymakers did open the border — highly unlikely — we can’t build a sustainable food system in the United States on the backs of former Mexican farmers who have been driven off their land by NAFTA and other binational U.S.-Mexico policies. The time has come for the U.S. sustainable-food movement to develop a North American consciousness — to foster a farmworker movement of its own, and to seek coalitions with Mexican small-farm advocates to rebuild local and regional food networks on both sides of the border. 

 

 

Simultaneously, it’s time to develop an idea floated by Anna Lappé on Grist a couple of months back: farm work as a green-collar job. Heard of Teach for America, the federal program that draws college graduates into critically important, but horribly paid, public-school jobs? The time for Farm for America is ripe — as ripe as the fruit that will soon be rotting on vines across the country for lack of pickers.

 

 

http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2008/05/30/?source=most_popular_rss

 

North Carolina-based Tom Philpott is Grist’s food editor.

 

The Urban Homestead: city gardening (book)

?’The Urban Homestead’ co-author Erik Knutzen talks city gardening and solar cooking : Emerald City : Los Angeles Times?    The LA times just recently did a blog article on the book The Urban Homestead by Erik Knutzen and his wife. Erik talks about city gardening and solar cooking in this recent work. I make a very, very brief review of the interview covering concepts like starting small, the absolute importance of soil, fruit trees, permaculture and more. STARTING SMALL It’s always a smart thing to start small. I learned that the hard way when I was trying to transform my yard almost 2 years ago. One of the first things Erik tells people is ?to start small.� The mistake that a lot of people make is trying to transform the entire house and yard all at once.� There are all these examples of people doing these really heroic projects to try and maximize the space all at once.� The easiest thing you can do if you have a yard is to build something like a small raised bed to grow a few vegetables in. The one we have is 4×8 feet made out of wood, but it could be made out of other stuff like broken concrete or whatever you have at hand.� You make a box with no bottom, then you buy soil or make compost, and then start vegetable gardening because you know the soil is good.? It?s a lot harder starting with a whole yard. A lot of work that could have been more wisely used. Back then I didn?t know as much as I do about soil and that tilling can destroy the soil structure. I turned over every bit of soil. Now I know. Alas, I don?t have the time to put that knowledge to use except for through my work to establish FoodCycles (http://foodcycles.org, more of a low energy, high compost greenhouse based on Growing Power Inc. [http://www.growingpower.org/]). SOIL: THE FOUNDATION Soil is the life blood of good food. It?s the ground you stand on. It?s what your vegetables (and animals if you have any) depend on for good nutrition. There are even cultures that eat soil just to get the right nutrients and build up a stronger immune system (by challenging it with the microbes in the soil). Erik explains: “Do you know the expression, “you don’t grow plants, you grow the soil?”� The first thing you really need is the right soil, and in most places the soil you’ll start out with is really bad. Using a raised bed is a way to jump-start growing while you amend the existing soil, which can take years. If you want to take over the lawn or do something more ambitious, the first step is to really grow the soil.� Make compost, but most people won’t be able to make enough to fertilize a whole yard so you might have to import compost.� We get horse bedding material.� Did you know L.A. has more horses per capita than any other large city in the country?� There is tons of compost around here…” Off the top of my head, it takes 100 years to create maybe 1 cm thickness of soil (if you aren?t using a lot of worm compost – haha). Yet today’s “modern” farming and land changing practices literally destroy the soil, something like at 10 times the rate it is created or we lose soil at 1 cm every 10 years – I probably read this somewhere in David Pimentel’s work (a agriculture researcher out of Cornell University). It seems to mirror our destruction of biodiversity – except we’re killing species at 1000 times the normal rate (still debated of course except the UN people who did some research certainly support this – think about last year?s cry about ocean?s losing all the fish!). “We don’t believe in tilling the soil.� We believe you should amend it from above.� Soil has a symbiotic system of fungus and worms that work with the roots of plants.� If you till it you’re going to destroy that relationship.� The way to build it is to add organic matter as mulch. You might have to gently break the soil up a little bit, with a tool called a broadfork, but do it gently.� You definitely shouldn’t till it.� Tilling isn’t just bad for the soil, it contributes to pollution because it releases CO2 into the atmosphere.” FRUIT TREES I’ve been thinking about how to get more of these trees in the city or in my yard. An interesting method in India called the Doshi system makes use of bags, compost and a lot of twigs to grow food. It can also be used to grow trees. You want to be “sure to plant them carefully so that they provide shade where you want it — say to cool the house, while at the same time not shading out areas where you want to grow sun-loving vegetables” according to Erik. PERMACULTURE In his interview, Erik talks about permaculture and having the “the plants work with each other in a mutually beneficial relationship“. He mentions the “three sisters”. “The best example of this is the “three sisters” that the Native Americans used to plant: corn, squash and beans. The idea being that beans are nitrogen-fixing plants, they pump nitrogen into the soil to fertilize the ground for the corn and the squash.� The corn grows up as a trellis for the beans. The squash serves as a mulch for the other plants. And together these three plants provide an ideal diet for humans.” (the corn and beans provide complementary protein which meets all your protein needs – the human body is made of 80% protein I might add) I definitely tried this one a year or two ago before my knowledge was as extensive as it was now. In my yard however the squirrels literally wreaked havoc. They ate my corn, knocking them over into the beans. Some of my yellow crookneck squash became victims too. The three aren?t going to be next garden idea for sure and wild corn is known to be notoriously hard to cultivate according to Gerrie Baker, Kingston market gardener and co-owner of The Worm Factory (http://www.thewormfactory.ca). What I like is the idea of using as little fossil fuel chemicals as possible. We need living machines (the plants, the insects, the animals) to work with us to grow food and thrive. That?s an important concept coming from permaculture. Erik states: ?This sort of gardening is the opposite of American agriculture.� Too often they’re putting in petro-chemicals temporarily into the soil to try and grow plants.� With permaculture you use nature to do that and create a beneficial feedback cycle.� It also simply requires less labor.? Erik goes on to say: ?One of the main goals of permaculture is to require as few human inputs as possible. There’s a phrase local permaculture expert David Khan taught me that I really like, “work makes work…” If you plant a grass lawn you have to mow it every week, you have to fertilize it.� I just don’t have time for that kind of work.� I don’t want that kind of work. I also don’t want to pay someone else to do it. If you work with nature rather than against her, you don’t have to do as much work.� Nature doesn’t need humans to make it go.? MORE THAN GARDENING It?s a lot more than just gardening. Erik talks about gardening for apartments or small spaces (I’m looking in your direction Molly), foraging in the nearby wild (there are cultures that still do that), home economics and fermenting your own stuff (make your own beer? preservation or canning anyone? in fact, Canadian Organic Growers Toronto is hosting a workshop on preservation – see below). What I love about the interview is the talk about the sourdough bread. “… all you have to do is mix flour and water together and every day throw out half the mixture (or make bread with it) and add more flour. The wild yeast is contained in the flour itself, and the air in smaller concentrations.� It’s there naturally.� It’s very easy to make good bread without commercial yeast.” “Bread without commercial yeast lasts longer, tastes better and some say is better for you.” Erik also talks about solar energy. It’s great that you can use it on a bike and even to cook rice. It ain’t as fast except you never burn it. “DN: I saw a woman at the bike expo in Pasadena the other week pulling an oven baking cookies with solar power on her bike.� I thought that was cool.” Erik on cooking rice: “We cook our rice in a solar cooker now and it’s easier than cooking on the stove.� We just throw it in the solar cooker and two hours later you have perfectly cooked rice and you can’t burn it. That’s the kind of thing we show how to do in the book and the kind of thing that someone in an apartment or someone who can’t afford solar panels can easily do.“ The book looks to be a fascinating and practically useful read. I am definitely keeping this on my to get wish list. June 25 : Canning and Preserving Workshop Hosted By: Canadian Organic Growers Toronto Whole Foods Kitchen, Hazelton Lanes, 87 Avenue Road, Toronto Time: 6:30 – 8:30 PM Cost: $5 (COG members free) Reserve your space: torontochapter@cog.ca A hands-on workshop to prepare you to can or preserve this summer’s harvest for future enjoyment! For the full interview go to:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/emeraldcity/2008/06/interview-with.html

Keywords: David Pimentel, Cornell, CO2, greenhouse gas emissions, fungus, worms, roots, plants, soil, vegetables, permaculture, urban, agriculture, garden, ferment, storage, preservation, canning, Canadian Organic Growers Toronto, biodiversity, corn, squash, bean, horse, compost, manure, chicken, egg, solar energy, cooking

Back Talk: Women & Poverty Forum on June 23rd

This is a local event in Toronto that may be of interest to poverty, hunger, labour and social justice advocates. I hope that Minister Deb Matthews and the provincial Cabinet Committee will actually act on these concerns because a lot of what I?m reading from Michael Prue?s email list on this whole process is not particularly reassuring.

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Back Talk: Women & Poverty Forum on June 23rd
Posted by Kate Mason on June 10, 2008 at 3:16pm
Toronto Community Based Research Network

Sistering, Street Health and the Ontario Women?s Health Network invite women to:

Back Talk-Women Speak about Reducing Poverty in their Lives

The Ontario government is developing a Poverty Reduction Strategy for the province and looking for ideas. Sistering and Street Health, with sponsorship of the Ontario Women?s Health Network, are hosting a forum for homeless, marginalized and low-income women to talk about what the government should do to reduce poverty.

Come to the forum and have your say about what the government should do in a comfortable, women?s space.

Minister Deb Matthews, women who are members of the Cabinet Committee on Poverty Reduction, and other influential women have been invited to listen to what you have to say.

When: Monday, June 23, 3:30-6:30 pm

Where: Sistering, 962 Bloor St. W.(Ossington subway station)

Discussion facilitated by Angela Robertson & Pat Capponi

Refreshments provided. TTC available.

RSVP to: Elsa Sulit at 416-926-9762 ext. 227 or at esulit@sistering.org

Demeter’s Wheat: A Fertile Heritage

Apparently the book, Demeter’s Wheats is hot off the press (see below). The author, Sharon Rempel has done urban and country agriculture. She also helped to found the original Seedy Saturday. She?s done a lot of work on ancient and heirloom grains which led to this book.

As a kid I was a great fan of the Greek myths. Demeter is the goddess of grain and fertility (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demeter).

Demeter is the ?… pure nourisher of the youth and the green earth, the health-giving cycle of life and death, and preserver of marriage and the sacred law.?

When the Romans adopted the goddess, they renamed her Ceres. The word “cereal” is derived from this.

Thank you Laura Berman and the Toronto Food Policy Council for this lovely send!
Laura Berman
GreenFuse Photos
416-785-4880

www.greenfusephotos.com
www.greenfusestock.com

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DEMETER’S WHEATS. Growing local food and community with traditional wisdom and heritage wheat. 2008. Published by: Grassroot Solutions, Victoria. $19.95 plus $1 GST and $6 shipping.
www.grassrootsolutions.com
Author and organic agronomist Sharon Rempel has worked with heritage wheat for twenty years. She’s convinced the old varieties have the ability to adapt quickly to a diversity of growing conditions and produce crops without chemical inputs. As founder of seasonal festivals to celebrate seed (‘Seedy Saturday’ and the ‘Bread and Wheat’ Festival) she recognizes that ‘culture’ is missing from today’s agricultural system.
Her book offers practical growing information, seed saving basics and a list of Canada’s heritage wheat varieties. The book also offers insights into today’s ‘green’, ‘local food’, ‘100 mile diet’, ‘food shortages’ and ‘carbon credits’. Sharon uses wheat and bread as metaphors to discuss deep issues that haunt society. She shares hope and inspiration that is rooted in the Mystery School cycle of ’seed’ from Neolithic times inGreece.
The cover shows a handful of ancestral heritage wheat that tops three photos from Syria. In May 2008 Sharon visited Tell Halula, a Neolithic site of agriculture (one of the first human communities where grains were cultivated 8000 B.C. and where there are no weapons found in the ruins). She was inspired by the courage of a young woman farmer to take over ‘on farm’ variety development on her family farm and by the typical ‘Syrian flat bread’ baked in tandoor ovens.
Sharon is holding a handful of Red Fife wheat on the back cover photo. It links with a photo of a hand holding seed with a quote “The hand that holds the seed controls the food supply”.
‘Demeter’s Wheats’ is a unique book that will stimulate thought, questions and provide a few answers in times when people are thinking about ‘growing community’. Sharon says ‘community starts with a seed bank’ and intentions of finding ways to work together cooperatively and collaboratively. The wisdom of local people, plants and place provide a dynamic growing energy that will provide answers for food today and in the future’.
Sharon Rempel can be reached in Victoria at (250) 298-1133 and via email at slrempel@shaw.ca Books can be ordered with a cheque or money order payable to Sharon; address 3741 Metchosin Road, Victoria, B.C. V9C 4A8, Canada.
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Sharon L. Rempel
www.grassrootsolutions.com
email: slrempel@shaw.ca

Sharon’s book is released! ‘DEMETER’S WHEATS. Growing local food
and community with traditional wisdom and heritage wheat.’
$19.95 plus $1 GST and $6 shipping to address below.
www.grassrootsolutions.com

3741 Metchosin Road
Victoria, B.C. V9C 4A8 Canada
tel: (250) 298-1133 fax upon request

Creating connections between “heritage wheat”
(including ‘Red Fife’), artisan bakers and breadaholics!

The 2008 Bread and Wheat Festival is Sunday November 2, 2008
at the Leonardo Da Vinci Center, 195 Bay Street Victoria B.C.
10 am – 4 pm. www.breadandwheat.com

UN Food Production Delusion?

The UN chief Ban Ki-Moon stated, “The world needs to produce more food.” Understandably, Ban may not grasp the true mess of the situation. Who would? Or more simply, reporters aren’t interested in anything except the money and the hot news.

In short some fuzzy logic points:
increased food production
= simplistic by itself
may not = other factors for hunger or poverty are addressed
may not = people will not be hungry
may not = food will go to the people who most need it

may not = food will not be produced using slave labour (last estimate 27 million official slaves – see http://www.freetheslaves.net/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=375&srcid=288 or exploitive labour as detailed in the report Who Reaps the Fruit 2006) = did you know chocolate slavery is the biggest form of slavery out there?)

may not = better communities where people have accessible, affordable, physical access to healthy or culturally appropriate food

does not = better “conventional” farming practices which don’t poison the land with huge amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (think of what a human being on a heroin, cocaine or crystal meth drug addiction is like – now apply that to farming) = not enough food = very low quality, unhealthy food (as proven by a research report like http://www.organic-center.org/reportfiles/Yield_Nutrient_Density_Final.pdf)

likely = already powerful and rich people will grow richer as they exploit people

Thank you Michael Rasile for sending me the following article.

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UN chief: food production must rise 50 percent by 2030
By FRANCES D’EMILIO and ARIEL DAVID, Associated Press WritersTue Jun 3, 7:54 AM ET

World food production must rise by 50 percent by 2030 to meet increasing demand, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon told world leaders Tuesday at a summit grappling with hunger and civil unrest caused by food price hikes.

The secretary-general told the Rome summit that nations must minimize export restrictions and import tariffs during the food price crisis and quickly resolve world trade talks.

“The world needs to produce more food,” Ban said.

The Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization is hosting the three-day summit to try to solve the short-term emergency of increased hunger caused by soaring prices and to help poor countries grow enough food to feed their own.

In a message read to the delegates, Pope Benedict XVI said “hunger and malnutrition are unacceptable in a world which, in reality, has sufficient production levels, the resources, and the know-how to put an end to these tragedies and their consequences.”

The Pope told the world leaders that millions of people at threat in countries with security concerns were looking to them for solutions.

Ban said a U.N. task force he set up to deal with the crisis is recommending the nations “improve vulnerable people’s access to food and take immediate steps to increase food availability in their communities.”

That means increasing food aid, supplying small farmers with seed and fertilizer in time for this year’s planting seasons, and reducing trade restrictions to help the free flow of agricultural goods.

“Some countries have taken action by limiting exports or by imposing price controls,” Ban said. “They only distort markets and force prices even higher.”

The increasing diversion of food and animal feed to produce biofuel, and sharply higher fuel costs have also helped to shoot prices upward, experts say.

The United Nations is encouraging summit participants to start undoing a decades-long legacy of agricultural and trade policies that many blame for the failure of small farmers in poor countries to feed their own people.

Wealthy nations’ subsidizing their own farmers makes it harder for small farmers in poor countries to compete in global markets, critics of such subsidies say. Jim Butler, the FAO’s deputy director-general, said in an interview ahead of the gathering that a draft document that could be the basis for a final summit declaration doesn’t promise to overhaul subsidy policy.

Congress last month passed a five-year farm bill heavy on subsidies, bucking White House objections that such aid in the middle of a global food crisis wasn’t warranted.

The head of the summit’s U.S. delegation, Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer, insisted on Monday that biofuels will contribute only 2 or 3 percent to a predicted 43 percent rise in prices this year.

Figures by other international organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, show that the increased demand for biofuels is contributing by 15-30 percent to food price increases, said Frederic Mousseau, a policy adviser at Oxfam, a British aid group.

“Food stocks are at their lowest in 25 years, so the market is very vulnerable to any policy changes” such as U.S. or European Union subsidizing biofuels or mandating greater use of this energy source, Mousseau said.

Brazil is another large exporter of biofuels, and President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva was expected to defend biofuels at the summit.

Several participants won’t even be talking to each other at the summit.

Australia’s foreign minister decried as “obscene” Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s participation in the summit. The longtime African leader has presided over the virtual transformation of his country from former breadbasket to agricultural basket case.

Zimbabweans increasingly are unable to afford food and other essentials with agriculture paralyzed by land reform and the world’s highest rate of inflation.

The Dutch ministry for overseas development pledged to “ignore” Mugabe during the summit.

EU sanctions against Mugabe because of Zimbabwe’s poor human rights record forbid him from setting foot in the bloc’s 27 nations, but those restrictions don’t apply to U.N. forums.

Jewish leaders and some Italian politicians were among those denouncing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s attendance at the meeting. On Monday, Ahmadinejad repeated his call for the destruction of Israel, which is also participating in the summit.

Ahmadinejad was scheduled to give a summit news conference Tuesday afternoon.

Schafer, asked about the presence of the Zimbabwean and Iranian leaders, told reporters in Rome that the two were welcome to attend the summit, but that U.S. delegates would not be meeting with them.

Lightning fast suburban farms

Australia has been suffering severe drought for quite awhile.  With global food prices rising more and more, people are finding it attractive to grow their own food regardless of where they are found in the world.  

 

It seems that some parts of the global fabric are slowly coming undone and people are forced ever so slowly (by necessity) to relocalize.  

 

Was it not the saying that “Necessity is the mother of all invention.”  Perhaps it should be re-worded as “Necessity is the mother of all rediscoveries.”

 

On a more local note, a group I’m helping to start up, FoodCycles is going to create an aquaponic greenhouse in Downsview Park (our temporary blog is at our domain http://foodcycles.org).  We’ll combine worm compost farming (which produces high quality compost), vegetable production (all year round) and raise tilapia.  This is based on the model set up by former basketball star Will Allen at Growing Power Inc. (www.growingpower.org/).  It will likely be classified as a social enterprise.

 

We’re hoping to create local jobs and do community outreach as well as become a focal point for action to address social and environmental issues.  We’d welcome any support from health or social justice advocates as well especially if they happen to deal with the Downsview Park community.  

 

If you know anyone who’d like to volunteer in the near future, just let me know.  We’d welcome the generous help.  We’re also hunting down some business consultants to provide some extra advice (we have a few in mind though we’d welcome additional suggestions or referrals).  

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As food prices climb and mainstream farming practices fall out of favour in today’s increasingly eco-minded climate, there’s growing incentive for consumers to farm their own food. Australian Permablitz is a group that focuses on bringing sustainable, edible gardens to the suburban neighbourhoods around Melbourne.

Permablitz picks up on permaculture, an idea dating back to the 1970s that revolves around the creation of perennial agricultural systems whose design mimics ecologies found in nature. Aiming to implement the notion throughout the Melbourne area, Permablitz holds weekend “blitzes” in which groups of volunteers come together to transform a suburban yard into a food-producing organic garden. One planned for June, for example, will be dedicated to helping “Ileana, Gavin and baby Michaela transform their backyard into a fruit, veg, herb and chicken egg producing wonderland.” Before each blitz Permablitz coordinates pre-blitz design visits and organises the materials that will need to be donated; post-blitz, it also conducts follow-up visits to check on the results. Along the way, the group hopes to share permaculture skills and build community networks. More than 40 permablitzes have now been held since the group began.

Its founders explain: “Our focus is edible gardens, and our ultimate aim is to make the suburbs edible enough such that should food become unaffordable, we don’t even notice.” An undeniably admirable goal, and one that dovetails nicely with the swelling public interest in all things green. And while urban and suburban farming obviously aren’t new, we like the blitz approach, which lends an air of instant gratification to the sometimes slowgoing process of gardening. Permablitz appears to operate on a purely volunteer basis—the site is open for anyone to post events—but there’s nothing to say the same idea couldn’t be implemented with ad support or sponsorships. Time to bring a little permaculture to your neck of the woods…? (Related: Urban farming.)

Website: www.permablitz.net

Contact: permablitz@gmail.com

Keywords:  urban agriculture, urban farming, local food, localization, suburbia, suburban, Permablitz, permaculture

 

Sunny Lam

 

Research and Management Consultant

Sunny Lam & Associates (MES)

t:  416 845 0818

http://www.sunnylam.ca

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

 

“Management, getting organized & productive, research, writing, action”

 

Member of Green Enterprise Toronto, FoodCycles, TCGN, COG Toronto