Farm Bill Update from Tom Philpott--grist.org

Congress (almost) passes a farm bill; Bush vows to veto
How should sustainable-food advocates respond to the latest farm bill proposal?
Posted by Tom Philpott at 4:59 PM on 08 May 2008


For months now, the 2007 farm bill has been in limbo, tied up in reconciliation negotiations between the House and the Senate.

On Thursday, the bicameral Farm Bill Conference Report agreed on a final proposal. The latest version will go to the larger House and Senate next week for approval; if all goes well, it will finally go to President Bush's desk.

But since this wouldn't be the 2007 farm bill without a final dose of drama, negotiations seem far from over. "The President will veto this bill," USDA chair Ed Schafer bluntly declared in a Thursday afternoon communique.

The sticking point is subsidy reform, or lack thereof. "This legislation lacks meaningful farm program reform and expands the size and scope of government," Schafer stated.

Many sustainable-ag and rural advocates would cheer a Bush veto. On the Center for Rural Affairs blog, Dan Owens recently laid out their case:

We will have the opportunity to fight again, and ... I have real hope that we can do better, that we can win more, that we can get a farm bill that is better than the one about to pass Congress. And we can try again in 2009. But if the bill becomes law, we will have to wait until 2013.

Others, however, disagree. They argue that the bill contains valuable provisions that need to be passed -- small victories that will be surrendered if farm policy reverts to the 2002 farm bill.

Below I'll try to sketch out what this latest version contains. I'll also be trying to get movers and shakers in the sustainable-ag/food-justice world to give their perspectives.

The most controversial bit in this farm bill is the commodity title -- the program through which the government ostensibly tries to smooth out the financial uncertainty of farming. The title has evolved over the years into a funnel that delivers the great bulk of the title's cash to the largest farms, doing little to balance out swings in supply and demand.

Bush wants to cut the subsidies because they have become a sticking point in global trade deals, and presumably because of Iraq-related budgetary concerns. Most sustainable-ag advocates would like to see them replaced with more equitable and effective ways of smoothing out supply and demand troubles -- ones that benefit farmers and consumers, not the few agro-industrial corporations that dominate our food system.

This Associated Press piece digs into the details of the current commodity title, and how the limits it places on subsidies fall short of what critics including the Bush administration had wanted. In an emailed communique (Word doc), the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition summarized the title like this:

Comprehensive payment limitation reform was not included in the bill. ... the net result is no change in the highly skewed status quo on payment limits for direct and counter-cyclical payments.

The latest version also includes a controversial "permanent assistance fund" worth $3.8 billion. A couple of months ago on Gristmill, Britt Lundgren and Jason Funk of Environmental Defense Fund called this provision a "a disaster for taxpayers, most farmers, and the environment." They say it encourages farmers to cultivate disaster-prone land. Bush, too, has sharply criticized this provision.

If the commodity title and the disaster fund are considered a disappointment, other provisions -- ones that, unhappily, involve far less money -- have drawn support.

The Community Food Security Coalition reported in a Thursday email that the new version contains funding for Community Food Projects -- vitally important programs designed to bring fresh, healthy food to places that now have little access. Writes acting policy director Steph Larsen:

The great news is that Community Food Projects (CFP) is in the final language, and we have $5 million in annual mandatory funding for the next 10 years! As you may recall, this year we started out with no money due to new congressional budget rules that cuts the funding for small programs. New language for CFP should fix this problem so that for the next Farm Bill, CFP will be able to build on the $5 million instead of starting from scratch with zero dollars. And with mandatory funding, we will not have to fight for these dollars every year.

Larsen added the bill also allows public schools to favor local farms in bids for school food. "This change will eliminate [a major] barrier for schools to support local agriculture and will make Farm to School programs easier to establish."

(Before anyone gets too excited, the bill does not add any funding to the miserly National School Lunch Program budget. Now schools can theoretically buy local; but they still have $.70-$1.00 to spend per day on ingredients for each kid's lunch.)

The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition also points to several victories, especially with regard to the Conservation Title. This title tries to balance the produce-as-much-as-possible thrust of the Commodity Title by giving farmers incentives to manage their land in ecologically sound ways.

The SAC declared the Conservation Title in the current version an overall "win," since it delivers "$4 billion net increase in mandatory spending, combined with $2.5 billion in savings from Conservation Reserve Program, for total new funding of $6.5 billion, and a continued rebalancing toward working lands conservation."

SAC also points to several "wins" in boosting funding for organic agriculture, including a "nearly five-fold increase to help cover the costs of organic certification," and a "a seven-fold increase" in funding for organic farming research and extension." It should be noted, though, these outlays amount to sums in the tens of millions over five years, while the cash devoted to industrial-scale farming runs to billions every year.

As for my beloved "packer ban," which would have forbidden meat packers like Tyson and Smithfield from owning livestock -- well, that didn't survive negotiations.

So, should the sustainable-ag community support a presidential veto -- or fight for a Congressional override?

New generation at farmers markets from Russ Parsons, LA TIMES

http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-newfarmer07-2008may07,0,919926.story?page=1
From the Los Angeles Times
Farmers markets, the next generation
As farmers age and retire, markets need new blood. A new generation of growers is appearing: idealistic newcomers, immigrants and family following in their parents' footsteps.
By Russ Parsons
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 7, 2008

THERE'S been a changing of the guard at the Coleman Family Farm stand at the Santa Monica Farmers Market on Wednesday mornings. Ask Bill Coleman a question and he's likely to answer, "Ask Romey."

Romey -- Romeo on his birth certificate -- is Coleman's son and though his eventually becoming the boss was expected, it nonetheless comes as a bit of a surprise to longtime market shoppers who might still think of him as the kid they watched grow up.

"I remember junior high summers, my dad would stuff us all in the front of the van and we'd drive to the Wednesday market," says Romeo, who is now 38 and sometimes brings his own two kids to the market. "This has always been a dream for me."

Though the handing down of a 6-acre farm is hardly newsworthy -- no matter how idyllic that spot might be -- the transition at Coleman Family Farm is part of a much larger picture.

One of the key questions facing farmers markets in the next decade is just who is going to replace the rapidly graying growers who led the green revolution of the last 30 years. Where will the next generation come from?

Will the markets, drawing on young farmers with new products and fresh ideas, continue to thrive and evolve as they have over the last 20 years, when the number of shoppers attending them more than tripled? Or, as more farmers hit retirement age, will the markets gradually dwindle and diminish?

More older farmers

IN GENERAL, experts say, new farmers market growers tend to come from one of three groups: young idealists looking for a rural lifestyle, immigrants who use farmers markets to make money from small plots of land, and those like Coleman who inherit family farms.

The problem of aging farmers is not unique to growers markets. During the last quarter of the 20th century the percentage of all farmers older than 65 increased from 16% to 26%. That compares with only about 3% of the total American workforce who are that age. And fully half of all American farmers are older than 55.

But the trend is especially noticeable at farmers markets, because the generation of farmers who led their boom in popularity during the 1980s and 1990s still predominate.

Though new faces do show up, they are a definite minority. At the bigger and more popular markets, there might be only one or two new farmers a year.

Though scores of new growers were certified for farmers markets during each of the boom years, more recently that flood has slowed to a trickle.

According to the agricultural commissioners offices of San Diego, Ventura and Riverside counties -- the areas that supply the lion's share of Southern California market farmers -- the number of certified farmers market growers has stayed about the same for the last several years.

"Each year we pick up between five and 10 new producers, but we lose about the same number," says Ron Bray of the Riverside County Agricultural Commissioner's office.

Today the shortage of new farmers mainly means it's more difficult to open new markets, but the implications for the future are more serious as greater numbers of farmers hit retirement age and quit.

"It's crucial that we continue to find young farmers because many farmers are retiring and if we want to continue this wonderful thing we have going on at farmers markets, we need to recruit a new generation to continue what has been done," says Pompea Smith of the organization Sustainable Economic Enterprises of Los Angeles, which manages seven Southern California farmers markets, including the popular Sunday market in Hollywood.

Any newcomer who wants to enter farming faces sizable hurdles. First and foremost, of course, is the price of land. Then there is the inevitable learning curve that goes with any new profession.

And then there's the problem of getting into the larger, more profitable markets, which often have waiting lists that can be years long, particularly for farmers who grow commonly available produce.

Those farmers have to go to several smaller markets each week to make the same income they might generate from two or three big markets. Often that means five or six days a week of packing up before dawn and driving several hours into the city.

Greenhorns to green thumbs



CHRISTOPHER and Johanna Finley of Finley Farms have grappled with all of those issues. They run a popular stand at the Sunday Hollywood market as well as at several markets in the Santa Barbara area and they are in the middle of the small-grower learning curve.

The couple, who embody the young, idealistic farmers market growers, met when they were both working at farmers market stands while attending UC Santa Barbara -- he was an environmental studies major and she studied ceramics. Finding their student jobs more interesting than their undergraduate training, four years ago they started to farm a 1-acre plot they rented north of Goleta.



Because farmers markets were already full of growers selling the same mix of tomatoes, peppers and herbs that they had, the Finleys had to chop up their produce and bottle it as salsa to secure a spot selling at even the smaller Santa Barbara area markets.

"It was a lot of work but we liked it," says Johanna, who is 29. Christopher just turned 30. "We could see the potential but we didn't want to do salsa anymore."

They decided to expand to grow a wider range of crops. They moved to a 1 1/2 -acre plot in the Santa Ynez Valley and bought their first tractor. The next year they started leasing more land from a neighbor, adding another 4 acres. The third year they added a little more leased land to bring them to a total of 10 acres.

Now, the Finleys grow kale, chard and mustard in the winter. There are peas in the fall and spring along with lettuce, arugula and spinach. Summer is sweet corn, melons and tomatoes.

"Anything we could grow in season, I think we've tried it," she says. "We're still in that phase of wanting to grow everything to see what sells and find out what our particular niche is. Everything we grow, we try to specialize in varieties that not everyone is doing."

It's a long and sometimes bumpy road. Some problems are mundane: Finding the cheapest top-quality seeds was one hurdle. Finding out where to buy produce-shipping boxes was another.

But sometimes they're more serious. A couple of weeks ago, a sudden frost killed all their zucchini plants. "We woke up and they were gone," Johanna says. "There's not anything we can do about it. We'll just have to get more seed and start again.

"With farming, there are always mistakes but there is always another season to get it right. And having a variety of products, if one fails, you're not wiped out because you've put everything into one product.

"It's a struggle, but we're lucky enough to be able to make ends meet," says Johanna, "We don't own our own land or any of those other things, but it's just a great way of life. I don't think I could be working for someone else right now."

For Juan Garcia and his son Armando, farmers markets allowed them to create a business of their own rather than just work for other people. Juan immigrated to north San Diego County from Michoacan in 1975 and went to work for Durling Nursery, a first-rate grower of fruit trees. Today, he's a foreman there supervising 50 workers.

But at the same time he was learning that job, with the help of his son he was striking out as an entrepreneur. Starting with just 9 acres purchased in 1990, he and Armando have gradually put together a farm near Fallbrook that now totals 27 acres of citrus, avocado, tropical fruit and mulberry trees.

"We basically just started putting some money aside," Juan Garcia says. "It was a lot of hard work, I'll tell you. But because I was working at the nursery I was able to get informed on everything coming out that was new. We've really concentrated on getting our hands on the good stuff."

Armando Garcia is a 29-year-old spark plug who practically chases customers down to get them to taste his Page tangerines. "You've got to try this, man, it's the bomb!" he says. And he's right. The fruit has the kind of flavor that only comes with great land, the best varieties and careful farming.

But even with all of that going for them, it might have been a different story had Armando not gotten a part-time job working for another farmers market grower while he and his father were establishing their orchards.

When the trees matured and produced fruit, Armando sold it at his friend's stands. Eventually, he took them over, and today Garcia Organic has coveted spots at Santa Monica's Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday markets.

But in most cases, a new farmer doesn't necessarily mean a new farm. Instead, especially at the more profitable markets, established growers pass along their sweet spots to their kids.

At Santa Monica's Wednesday market, right next to the Coleman's stand is Coastal Farms, where Mark Carpenter is working alongside mother Maryanne and father Paul, selling lettuce, squash and grape tomatoes.

A little farther along is Gloria Tamai, part of a farmers market family that is going on four generations (her sister-in-law Daisy is usually helping out at Green Farms on the other side of Arizona Avenue).

The chain started with their father, Jim Tamai, who, along with Bill Coleman, was among the first farmers at the Santa Monica market. He passed away last spring and now, in addition to the two daughters and a daughter-in-law, there are eight grandchildren in the business as well.

Also nearby is Maggie's Farm, run by Dennis Peitso and his son Nate.

And just up Arizona Avenue is Harry's Berries, run by the combined Gean and Iwamoto families and named for the late patriarch, Harry Iwamoto, who got them started growing strawberries for the farmers markets. Today Kaz and Yoshiko Iwamoto run the business side, and Molly and her husband, Rick Gean, supervise the farming and the selling. In addition, there are five assorted children and grandchildren working the markets.

A successful handoff

AS WITH all family businesses, the transition from one generation to the next isn't always seamless. Molly Gean says the secret to Harry's Berries' success was each person focusing on what he or she does best and staying out of the others' ways. "I'd say we try to avoid conflict by staying in our own corners."

"It's funny how attached we get to doing something the way we've always done it," says Bill Coleman, whose gruff demeanor is legendary. "I finally came to the realization that I'm not that important anymore. There's somebody else who is doing what I used to do and he's doing a really good job, too.

"And I'll tell you what, the first time someone came up to me and asked me how it felt to have my son following in my footsteps, I almost cried. I'm so lucky, so very lucky."

For Romeo, the future is a little more mixed. As in love as he is with the farming life, he also realizes "my longest vacation from now on is going to be six days, and I'm never going to have another Wednesday off."

READ MULCHBLOG.COM

Wow, much to read on mulchblog.com!
Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group, a public interest research and advocacy organization sums up two articles he believes are must reads on the farm bill, one I've copied in the post below, "Farm Bill upends normal political order." Tough to read if you're a critic of President Bush and a supporter of Nancy Pelosi.

If you are confused and squirming, read this blogger, who wants you to see Bush in context and if you heard that Pres. Bush recommended eating local foods, read more here... http://expatriateskitchen.blogspot.com/

Thanks to cleanerplateclub.wordress.com for the lead. http://cleanerplateclub.wordpress.com/

Yesterday, May 3, 2008, Ken Cook on mulchblog.com quotes from the Wall Street Journal on The Ethanol Boom: " Washington's Having Second Thoughts".... http://www.mulchblog.com

"Farm bill upends normal political order"

Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Bureau

Sunday, May 4, 2008
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Associated Press photo by Jim...

(05-04) 04:00 PDT Washington - -- It is the rarest of moments: President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are on a collision course over a giant farm bill, but it is Bush who is broadly aligned with liberal Bay Area activists pushing for reform, while the San Francisco Democrat is protecting billions of dollars in subsidies to the richest farmers.

A conference committee approved on Thursday most of a nearly $300 billion farm bill that will lock in the nation's food policy and environmental stewardship on millions of acres of private land for the next five years. Hoping to survive a veto, lawmakers doled out money to everyone from thoroughbred racehorse owners to food-stamp recipients.

The package melds last year's House and Senate farm bills for votes in both chambers before going to the White House. Several controversies remain to be worked out this week. The administration threatened a veto, with Bush deriding a "massive, bloated" effort.

Lawmakers are betting that Bush will not dare kill a $10.3 billion increase in nutrition spending such as food stamps, which make up the bulk of the bill, or anger farm-state Republicans in an election year. If he does, they plan to override him.

Congress has its bases covered. Each interest group represented in the sprawling legislation - from tiny Santa Cruz organic vegetable growers to Georgia cotton magnates, from conservationists to prairie-plowers - gets enough money that it would prefer this bill rather than start over with a new president.

Farm bills come around just once every five years and usually fly under the radar of most lawmakers and the public, making it easy for Congress to tout the bills as aid to family farmers. The commodity supports - born as temporary economic aids in the 1930s - are mind-numbingly complicated and get little notice outside the farm press, despite their enormous impact on U.S. food policy. Urban lawmakers are normally happy to vote for crop subsidies in exchange for food-stamp votes from rural lawmakers. It is textbook political logrolling.

This year looked different. The local-food movement, concentrated in the Bay Area, increased attention on subsidy-driven distortions that supercharge the industrialization of agriculture, boost corn-based sugars, fats and starches in the U.S. diet and undermine poor farmers overseas.

California, the nation's farming giant, stepped into the bargaining. Produce growers, left out of crop subsidies since the 1930s, demanded marketing aid. Long-neglected organic growers were desperate for research help. Public health advocates wanted healthier school lunches. Environmentalists saw millions of acres of private land ripe for conservation and improved farming practices to reduce water and air pollution.

These groups allied with budget hawks to try to shift aid from commodities to healthier food and more sustainable farming.

The administration proposed a farm bill two years ago that would have cut off payments to wealthy farmers, modernized subsidies, and moved money to nutrition and environmental programs. When former Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns told groups the administration's plans, "They didn't believe it," said Department of Agriculture spokesman Keith Williams. "He'd get jeers, and he'd say, 'No, it's in here.' "

Pelosi threw her weight behind farm-state Democrats, pushing a bill through the House last summer that protected subsidies, and ostensibly, the newly elected Democrats from rural districts.

"The administration is our ally in wanting more significant commodity reform," said Heather Fenney, coordinator of the California Food and Justice Coalition, a Berkeley-based group pushing for healthier food and sustainable farming.

"We've wondered if we weren't living in a parallel universe," said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group. "The president has been to the left of the speaker."

Instead of cutting subsidies, Congress increased spending, raised taxes and engaged in budget acrobatics to make everything appear to fit.

As the commodities boom accelerated over the winter, boosting farm income to new records, the disconnect between the farm bill and economic reality grew more bizarre. Food riots broke out in Egypt, Haiti and other countries where the poor spend much of their earnings on food. At home, food inflation hit 4.4 percent, squeezing consumers already pinched by fuel prices.

The bill would spend about $5 billion a year on automatic payments, mostly to farmers of five crops - corn, wheat, cotton, rice and soybeans - giving two-thirds of the money to the top 10 percent of growers. Embarrassed by the spectacle, some farm-state lawmakers pushed for payment limits, fearing a loss of public support for farm aid.

Pelosi touted a ban on payments to farm couples earning more than $2 million, 10 times higher than Bush's $200,000 income limit.

At the same time, she backed a 50 percent increase in the actual amount of money each farmer could get. The Senate added a new $3.8 billion "permanent disaster" program to bail out farmers of drought-prone land, intensifying the push to plow fragile prairie.

"This is not even the illusion of reform," said Rep. Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat who intends to fight a $1.7 billion cut in money added by the House for conservation. "Not when you dole out $50 billion in direct payments over 10 years that bear no relation to market prices or production. ... The president is right."

Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, called the administration's proposals a mixed bag, saying administration officials "sit in the room with an incredible amount of leverage and don't negotiate."

Congress, however, produced "an utter lack of effective pro-family-farmer reform," Hoefner added.

To avoid a Bush veto, negotiators devised a complicated scheme to limit payments to extremely wealthy landowners. Hoefner calculated that married couples would have to earn $2.9 million to lose their federal checks.

At the same time, the bill would boost by 25 percent the payments farmers can collect, said Chuck Hassebrook, executive director of the Center for Rural Affairs.

"It's remarkable that anyone could call this reform with a straight face," Hassebrook said.

To secure votes, negotiators added a $93 million write-off for thoroughbred racehorses at the behest of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Arkansas Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln. That is nearly as much money as organic farmers will get for research, data collection and certification help for small growers.

The organic money is "a very significant step, but it is very far away from a fair share" given the gains organic food has made in the market, said Mark Lipson, policy program director for the Organic Farming Research Foundation in Santa Cruz. Still, he prefers the bill to pass for fear of losing this money.

"It's just transactional politics at its worst," said Rep. Jeff Flake, a maverick Arizona Republican who plans to attack the bill on the House floor.

Pelosi threatened to blast Bush for killing the food-stamp increase if he vetoes the bill, issuing a statement urging Bush to sign the legislation to "ensure that 38 million Americans - especially children - have improved access to basic nutrition."

Adding to the likelihood that Congress could find the votes to override a veto: California fruit and vegetable growers would be furious if a veto kills their first-ever funding. Conservation groups fear losing $4 billion in new funding for environmental programs, even though that figure was cut back to make way for the disaster program.

Farm-state Republicans met with Bush to pressure him to sign the bill. "We need him to understand that this is good policy," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.

Democratic presidential contenders Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York supported the farm bill last year. Likely GOP nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona backed a failed effort at a radical overhaul and told Iowans last week that if he were president he would veto the bill, calling crop subsidies unnecessary.

For a list of senators and representatives serving on the conference committee, go to links.sfgate.com/ZDGB

E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.

Steps toward sustainable

Tom Philpott writing on grist.org:

"Nationwide, farmers markets and other local-food institutions, for all their vibrancy, generally remain niche operations catering to a relatively tiny portion of the population. The Kellogg Foundation (no longer related to the industrial-food giant famous for its corn flakes) reckons that nationwide, just 2 percent of food consumed truly qualifies as sustainable.

One reason: although the farmers market model works well for farms small enough to sell all or most of their produce directly to consumers, it makes only limited economic sense for mid-sized family farms. And it's precisely these mid-sized farms that could ramp up local and regional food chains to a point where they supply a large part of the American diet.

Middle of the Story


So why isn't that happening?

It's not for lack of numbers. According to a 2007 USDA study, the U.S. now houses just under a million "working farms" -- that is, farms generating at least $10,000 in annual revenue. And mid-sized farms -- those with annual revenues between $50,000 and $250,000 -- represent fully a third of that total. In fact, they outnumber large farms (those bringing in more than $250,000) by about two to one.

The problem, rather, is market structure. In the United States today, there are essentially two marketing channels for farms. You can sell your produce directly to consumers, through farmers markets and CSAs; or you can sell it to gigantic corporate buyers that have tremendous leverage to set price. The former model works well enough for small farms; the latter works best for large operations tightly focused on one or two crops -- mostly corn and soy.

In that light, it's not surprising that spaces like Carrboro Market brim with the bounty of small farms, and our supermarket shelves groan with goods that amount to clver combinations of processed corn and soy. As a group of agriculture scholars led by Fred Kirschenmann wrote in a seminal paper called "Why Worry about Agriculture of the Middle?" mid-sized farms get squeezed in this arrangement. They are "too small to compete in highly consolidated commodity markets, and too large ... to sell in direct markets."

As a result, they operate under severe pressure. The above-linked USDA document tells a grim story. Despite the fact that mid-sized farms make up a third of working farms at present, we are losing them at a rate of more than 10 percent every five years. Meanwhile, the number of large and mega-farms is growing robustly.

Between 1997 and 2003, for example, 10.9 percent of farms with revenues between $50,000 and $99,000 closed their barn doors, as did 11.2 percent of farms bringing in between $100,000 and $249,000. Over the same period, the ranks of mega-farms with revenue exceeding $5 million swelled by 42 percent.

Another USDA study, this one from 2006, illustrates the obliteration of mid-sized farms in stark economic terms. On average, farms with revenues between $100,000 and $249,000 have an operating profit margin of negative 1.8 percent. Their operations lose money or make very little, and they augment family income with off-farm work. By contrast, farms that do between a quarter and a half million in business have operating profit margins of 10 percent, and farms with revenue of more than a half million have an average margin of 16 percent.

These large-scale farms don't respond to the needs of their surrounding communities; to remain profitable, they toe the line laid down by the huge multinational food conglomerates that buy their crops. Mid-sized farms could fill the void between the farmers market and the grocery section of Wal-Mart at the local and regional level, but right now, the marketing infrastructure needed to move their goods to nearby consumers doesn't exist.

As Kirschenmann et al put it, huge buyers of farm goods like Wal-Mart, Archer Daniels Midland, and to a large degree even Whole Foods have serious incentives to deal with only the largest farms. It simply costs less "to contract with one farmer who raises 10,000 hogs than ten farmers who raise 1,000 hogs," they write.

Thus to break the stranglehold of industrial food over the American diet, we need to find new ways to connect consumers with mid-sized farmers. The infrastructure for doing so -- locally owned grocery stores, dairy-processing plants, slaughterhouses, canneries -- has withered away as the food industry consolidated over the decades. And farmers themselves, with their razor-thin if not negative profit margins, don't have the resources to make those investments. Closing the gap between mid-sized farmers and their nearby communities counts, I think, as the major challenge of the sustainable-food movement going forward.

So far, the most promising efforts to meet that challenge have come at the local level. Last fall, I wrote about one such effort in Woodbury County, Iowa. There, farmers and consumers have worked hard to raise money to create a farmer-owned restaurant, processing center, distribution business, and grocery store -- explicitly to give the area's remaining mid-sized farms a viable market other than the one for corn and soy. All over the country, similar initiatives are bubbling up, and I'll continue highlighting them.

"If present trends continue, mid-sized farms, along with the social and environmental benefits they provide, will likely disappear in the next decade," Kirschenmann and his associates wrote several years ago. Since then, with the rise of the biofuel boom and the jump in corn and soy prices, those trends have intensified. As go mid-sized farms, so likely go the prospects for any real challenge to the myriad ravages of industrial food.

Michael Pollan on climate change April 20th, 2008

Warning: This is provocative here in the Berkshires because it suggests that you stop eating meat and doesn't say, try eating your locally grown meat. Berkshire Grown supports our local farmers who are raising animals, AND we also support thinking about controversial issues that we may not always agree on.

New York Times Magazine April 20, 2008

The Way We Live Now

Why Bother?

By MICHAEL POLLAN

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the “why bother” question. Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

A sense of personal virtue, you might suggest, somewhat sheepishly. But what good is that when virtue itself is quickly becoming a term of derision? And not just on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal or on the lips of the vice president, who famously dismissed energy conservation as a “sign of personal virtue.” No, even in the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet “virtuous,” when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue — a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue — became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment — buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore — should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.

And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I’ve got to consider not only “food miles” but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I’ll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.” For Berry, the “why bother” question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

But while some such grand scheme may well be necessary, it’s doubtful that it will be sufficient or that it will be politically sustainable before we’ve demonstrated to ourselves that change is possible. Merely to give, to spend, even to vote, is not to do, and there is so much that needs to be done — without further delay. In the judgment of James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who began sounding the alarm on global warming 20 years ago, we have only 10 years left to start cutting — not just slowing — the amount of carbon we’re emitting or face a “different planet.” Hansen said this more than two years ago, however; two years have gone by, and nothing of consequence has been done. So: eight years left to go and a great deal left to do.

Which brings us back to the “why bother” question and how we might better answer it. The reasons not to bother are many and compelling, at least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly tentative reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I’m describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on. Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to “conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day.” Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we’re counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

Volunteers farm to donate to food banks in Virginia

Filling a Growing Need
At a Farm in Va., Volunteers Raise Produce to Donate to Food Banks

By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 13, 2008; C01

WOODSTOCK, Va. -- On a crisp spring Saturday in the Shenandoah foothills, a cry rang out and multiplied through the potato fields, down the lines of tilled dirt, past hats and bluejeans and little kids trying to remember what seven inches looked like to space the spuds.

As they finished planting the potatoes, a farmworker announced in a booming voice that the 80 volunteers would move on to a different field to plant onions.

The crowd cheered with the enthusiasm of people whose work that day was greater than the day itself. They were part of an unusual charitable effort, planting crops to supply more than 430 food banks in nine cities and 25 counties in Virginia, including Fauquier and Loudoun.

"I think it's great to give back to the community," said Michael Armstrong, 17, a student at Strasburg High School. "It goes to the food banks, and it's a good cause."

As he talked, Armstrong loaded potatoes into a white bucket initially used for kosher pickles.

Bob Blair started the Volunteer Farm in Shenandoah County ( http://www.volunteer http:// http://farm.org) five years ago on land he had bought to escape the metropolitan routine of working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington and living in McLean.

This year, the farm will plant 40 acres of watermelons, cantaloupes, green beans, beets, turnips, onions, corn, peas, cucumbers, potatoes, okra and lima beans. Harvesting varies with the planting seasons, but the onions will come in July and the potatoes in August.

The Blue Ridge Food Bank picks up the food in crates, loads it onto a truck and distributes it to pantries in its network.

Blair, 73, a jovial man with a shock of white hair, is a widower, a father of three and the son of a newsman who covered the Southwest and South America for NBC.

When Blair worked for FEMA as a public affairs official, covering more than 400 disasters before he retired 16 years ago, he had a small vegetable garden in his McLean home.

"It was very shady, so it wasn't successful," he said. "The kids didn't like vegetables anyway."

Blair first started a Christmas tree farm on the land. Then he had a vision one night that led him to a new calling: to grow food for the needy.

"I woke up one morning, and I don't try to put any religious meaning in this, but there was an idea, a total idea in essence," he said. "I considered it to be mandatory orders."

The farm is majestically lighted by sunrises, and on cool spring mornings, the fields are covered in dew. Horses graze at nearby farms, and tractors share the roads with cars.

"We're out here to help and to serve God," said Amber Brady, 19, a student at James Madison University. "Plus, I'm out here having fun with my friends."

Blair spoke to the volunteers about his mission before sending them out to the fields.

"If we don't do something, then we're not going to close this poverty," he said. "Obesity. Diabetes. It's a gap we're not even trying to zero in on."

Volunteers come from church groups, scout troops, high schools, university clubs, fraternities and sororities. Last year, the farm had 2,300 volunteers. Of those, nearly three-fourths were under 18.

Some of the youngest are 5 or 6 years old. Blair said the young volunteers sometimes understand hunger better than the adults.

"They often, almost through sensing it, know kids in their class who are hungry," he said. "An adult wouldn't catch that difference."

The Volunteer Farm provides produce to food banks to supplement their canned goods and nonperishable items, which are often cheaper and easier to collect, store and distribute.

Steven McFarland, spokesman for Chicago-based America's Second Harvest, said that more people are going hungry and that food banks everywhere are experiencing shortages as they try to keep up with increased demand.

Second Harvest, the largest charitable food network in the country, collects and distributes more than 2 billion pounds of food and grocery products to more than 200 food banks and food-rescue organizations in all 50 states, the District and Puerto Rico each year.

The network estimated in its 2006 hunger survey that 66 percent of all the households it serves have annual household incomes at or beneath the poverty line.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated in 2005 that 35.1 million Americans are "food insecure," meaning their access to enough food is limited by a lack of money and other resources.

"The economic climate is making things difficult for everyone," McFarland said, adding that food-bank-dedicated farms such as the one in Virginia are rare.

More often, food banks get leftover produce from farmer's markets or "seconds" that might be difficult for farmers to sell. They also rely on government programs to buy produce.

Brian Smith, chief operating officer for the Capital Area Food Bank in the District, said the banks never have enough fresh produce.

The Capital Area Food Bank serves an estimated 383,000 people a year, "and that number is growing," Smith said.

Ginny Hamrick, a Strasburg resident who works at Compassion Cupboard, a food pantry supported by local churches, said having fresh produce gives needy people a sense of dignity.

"It gives the families an opportunity to have a choice of fresh vegetables instead of getting canned, processed food," she said.

Wynettia Slaughter, a caseworker with a transitional housing program in Bealeton in Fauquier County, said the farming charity benefits the program's food bank.

"It's going to feed many people," she said. "And it gives churches and families an opportunity to grow their own food."

Sam Hurst writes: "Betting the Farm"

"Late last autumn, Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, was furious. After a year of hearings, staff work, and backroom bargaining, he had finally pushed a bipartisan Farm Bill out of committee. But before a single word had been spoken in debate on the Senate floor, President Bush had labeled the $286 billion proposal a budget buster and threatened a veto.

"Farm law has its roots in the New Deal efforts of the 1930s to control overproduction of agricultural commodities, and it has been revised, reworded, and reauthorized every five years since then. Both the House proposal and the Senate version run more than 1,000 pages. The language is impenetrable. It is traditionally hammered out by an informal bipartisan alliance of farm-state politicians and agribusiness groups as if the food we eat and the way it is grown is their private preserve. In recent years, public-health experts, conservationists, chefs, healthy-food advocates, and family farmers have tried to insert themselves into the debate, but their voices are almost completely drowned out by those of industrial agriculture. As this year’s bill lumbered through negotiations, one frustrated congressional staffer observed that it would once again be “a patchwork of parochial programs lacking a vision.”

"Harkin’s compromises weren’t perfect. He was the first to admit that. He had not successfully reduced commodity payments to rich farmers. Southern rice and cotton representatives blocked him. He had not gotten as much as he wanted for new conservation programs. Few farm-bloc legislators made the connection between farm policy and the obesity epidemic. But he had accomplished small victories: more money for organic research and conversion, a new program to put fresh fruits and vegetables in schools, incentives for school lunch programs to purchase food from local farmers, more money to support farmers markets. All that remained was to steer the Senate bill through the Conference Committee with the House. A veto threat was the last thing Harkin needed. Democrats started talking about tabling the whole mess. “Wait until after the election,” they whispered.

"Meanwhile, on a sprawling farm in Walworth County, South Dakota, Matthew Stiegelmeier watched the debate in Washing ton with disinterested disdain. He was spending his late- autumn afternoons replacing nails on the barn roof. With his sisters Rachel, Martha, and Abby, and his young brother, Ben, he balanced precariously on the slick steel slope, prying out old nails and drilling in new ones—painstaking, monotonous work. But when the snow piled up last winter, the roof leaked. Amid the chatter of pry-bars and hammers and drills, I wondered out loud, “Can’t you tell your mom you’ve got schoolwork to do?” Rachel looked down at me scornfully. “This is school.”

To keep reading the link is in the next post:

Why you should care about the Farm Bill

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2008/04/farmbill

Sam Hurst writes in April's edition of Gourmet Magazine an article called "Betting the Farm."

Washington has created a tangled web of subsidies that determines the way our food is grown. One South Dakota family demonstrates why you should care about the Farm Bill.

Paul Krugman on the Food Crisis

Op-ed columnist Krugman writes in the NYTIMES on April 7, 2008:
"...Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans — but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending.

"There have already been food riots around the world. Food-supplying countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have been limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers, leading to angry protests from farmers — and making things even worse in countries that need to import food."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/opinion/07krugman.html?em&ex=1207800000&en=814beb53994fd272&ei=5087%0A

Farm to Table Networking April 7, 2008 3 -5 Pittsfield Brew Works

If you are a farmer, chef, professional food buyer or producer, you’re invited to Berkshire Grown’s Farm to Table Networking Party!

Chefs: bring your wish lists (what you hope farmers will grow)
Farmers: bring your product lists (what you are growing this year)

Bring your friends who are farmers, food buyers and chefs and help us grow the farm-to-table connection in the Berkshires. Here's a chance for nonmembers to get to meet Berkshire Grown's Farm to Table network. Berkshire Grown Professional Members can take home the 2008 Farm to Table Directory.

Light Refreshments and a couple Farm to Table stories will get the Networking started.

“Tad, Terry and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”
with Tad Ames, Berkshire Natural Resources Council
~Terry Moore, The Old Mill~Ted Dobson, Equinox Farm

Please RSVP/ more info: 413-528-0041

Food Fight!!

Food fight grows over the cream of the crop

By Russ Parsons, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 9, 2008

Josiah Citrin was livid. As chef-owner at Santa Monica's M�lisse -- one of only three Michelin two-star restaurants in Southern California -- Citrin is used to getting what he wants, particularly when it comes to sweet, fresh English peas. But Wednesday morning, the McGrath Family Farms stand at the Santa Monica Farmers' Market was sold out, and Citrin was on the warpath.

read more

Farmers Market in Santa Monica, CA changing

Food fight grows over the cream of the crop

By Russ Parsons, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 9, 2008

Josiah Citrin was livid. As chef-owner at Santa Monica's M�lisse -- one of only three Michelin two-star restaurants in Southern California -- Citrin is used to getting what he wants, particularly when it comes to sweet, fresh English peas. But Wednesday morning, the McGrath Family Farms stand at the Santa Monica Farmers' Market was sold out, and Citrin was on the warpath.

It wasn't a matter of the peas not being there that made him angry; he could see boxes of them behind the table. But they had all been ordered in advance -- mainly by produce companies that would sell them to restaurants and markets across the country.

"The chefs who actually come to the market every week need to be supported," Citrin fumed to anyone who would listen -- and quickly a who's who of the L.A. food scene gathered around: Jason and Miho Travi of Culver City's Fraiche, considered by many the best new restaurant in Southern California; Donato Poto of seafood temple Providence, Vicki Fan and Kazuto Matsusaka of trendy Beacon, Mark Peel of landmark Campanile.

Quinn Hatfield, chef-owner at the tiny, highly regarded Hatfield's on Beverly Boulevard, joined in.

"This is my last day here," he said. "I don't want to compete with the produce companies. Look at all of these trucks. This isn't a farmers market anymore; it's some kind of boutique wholesale operation."

It may seem like a tempest in a pea pod, but it's one more sign that the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers' Market, one of the most cherished food institutions in Southern California, is undergoing profound change.

Though ordinary shoppers can still rub elbows with famous chefs while buying just-picked fruits and vegetables from folksy farmers, there is no denying that the market has also become an important economic engine.

Those same fruits and vegetables you buy for your family might also wind up on tables at fancy restaurants in Las Vegas and New York, flown out by major produce companies such as LA Specialty and FreshPoint Consolidation, a subsidiary of restaurant supply giant Sysco Corp.

Inspired by the chefs, home cooks have adopted many of the ingredients themselves, and now former rarities such as Meyer lemons, blood oranges and fingerling potatoes can be found at high-end supermarkets across the country, many of them bought at the Santa Monica Farmers' Market by specialty produce distributors Frieda's and Melissa's.

For the small farmers who grow those items, the market is an economic lifesaver -- a place where they can earn more than commodity prices for growing ingredients that can't be found elsewhere or that taste better than what the big farmers grow.

Though no hard figures are kept, some growers say that as much as half of what they sell at the market is bought by produce companies.

As a result, what had long been a kind of informal meeting place for many of Southern California's foodies and chefs is no longer quite so clubby. What chefs once regarded as a combination of culinary laboratory and kaffeeklatsch -- a place to find new ingredients and ideas and swap gossip, sometimes seemingly in equal proportions -- is more and more a place for big business.

"It used to be that everyone thought how great it was to be out there picking things for ourselves; it was so exciting," said Matt Molina of the white-hot Mozza restaurants, co-owned by star chefs Mario Batali and Nancy Silverton. "Then all of a sudden it began to become a business, a big-money business. Now farmers are sometimes catering to the big people, so local restaurants are sometimes getting left behind.

"I can understand why Quinn [Hatfield] gets upset. It's turned into a very tricky market. It's not just this little mom and pop thing anymore, the way it was back 20 years ago."

Farmers markets started out in the late 1970s as a way to help small farmers and bring fresh produce to home cooks. Chefs, drawn by just-picked freshness and often hard-to-find ingredients, enthusiastically adopted them.

And gradually the markets became something more than just a place to shop. Cooking in a restaurant, even a very fine one, can be isolating -- both creatively and socially. Night after night, chefs churn out the same menu items, and the only way they can meet other professionals is by driving across town for a late drink after closing.

Surrounded by ingredients at farmers markets, chefs found that they could let their imaginations roam free of the constraints of the menu. Many items that we now regard as fine dining staples got their start this way. What could you do with the green garlic some farmers brought in? Or all of those fava beans? Or stinging nettles, for goodness' sake?

At the same time, chefs could connect with their colleagues, catch up on family news or compare linen services and valet parking companies.

Now they say that the increasing commercialism of farmers markets is threatening that. Today, along with shoppers and chefs, there are representatives of big commercial produce distributors walking the market, often trailed by workers with truck dollies to help tote away purchases.

Chefs, including Citrin and Hatfield, accuse corporate buyers of hogging the best produce, keeping it out of the hands of hardworking, hands-on cooks like themselves.

But Peel, who has been shopping at the Wednesday market most weeks since opening Campanile in 1989, points out that it wasn't so long ago that the same complaint was being leveled by shoppers against him and other chefs.

"Farmers markets started as a way for farmers to sell directly to home cooks, then chefs started going there and home cooks would moan about the chefs coming in early and scooping up everything good," he said. "I'm a chef, and I'd kind of roll my eyes and say, 'Get out of bed earlier.' Now the same thing is happening to us."

The average shopper probably hasn't noticed much of a difference. If you want to buy only a pound or two of English peas, they're still there; it's the 10-pound purchase that gets tricky. And as far as the real treasures are concerned, well, those have been out of reach for years. To get your hands on James Birch's fragrant Persian mulberries or Jerry Rutiz's candied wild strawberries, your best chance is befriending one of the chefs who have long claimed almost all of them.

Certainly, there's nothing preventing Citrin and Hatfield from phoning in their orders in advance, as do other chefs and produce companies. But Hatfield says the spontaneity of choosing what's best at the farmers market and letting it inspire his menu is one of the great things about being a chef.

"To me, that's what going to the farmers market is all about," Hatfield said. "If I'm going to have to pre-order things in order to be sure I get them, I might as well just stay in bed an extra of couple hours every Wednesday morning."

Chris Kidder of Brentwood's Literati II shops the market regularly, but he has started to pre-order more of the things he needs.

"But I am still going to go there to get other things I might not know about or to find the very best products," Kidder said.

On the other side of the argument are farmers like Phil McGrath, he of the hotly sought sweet peas.

"Look, I don't want to make anybody mad, but is it so hard to pick up the phone?" he asked plaintively. "Can't they call us up the day before and say, 'Hey are you coming down tomorrow? Could you bring some peas?' "

The issue goes well beyond mere convenience. Farming is a business that runs on highly perishable stock, and when something is harvested it must be sold quickly, particularly when it's as fragile as English peas, which start to turn from sweet to starchy within hours of being picked. Peas that don't get sold are good only for compost.

"Someone calls in an order, and that's a sale that's already made and paid for as far as I'm concerned," McGrath explained. "When I bring something to the market and put it out on the table, that's a gamble. I don't know whether I'll sell those or not."

One of the most constant of the commercial shoppers at the Wednesday market is Karen Beverlin of FreshPoint. Her company ships produce from the Santa Monica Farmers' Market all over the country, including to restaurants in Las Vegas and New York. But Beverlin said 90% of its sales are in Southern California, to customers as varied as Providence restaurant and the USC dining hall.

"I think we're helping the family farmers who come to the market, and isn't that what it's all about?" she said. "I don't haggle about prices with the farmers I buy from. . . . In most cases, I'm paying exactly the same prices for most of what I buy as you would if you just walked up to the table.

"We do want the farmers markets to remain vibrant, and I think we're helping that on multiple levels: We're helping them economically, we're encouraging a vibrant community and we're giving chefs access to high-quality, local, seasonal produce, much of it sustainably grown, even if they can't come to the farmers market every week. How can that be bad?"

Caught in the middle is Santa Monica market manager Laura Avery, who has run the operation since 1982, just a year after it opened.

"There is certainly a wide range of opinions among farmers, among chefs and among the produce companies," she said. "They're all trying to get more small-farm produce into restaurants, which is great. But we want to be sure to keep stuff on the tables for regular customers and smaller restaurants who come every week."

One idea Avery has been considering is separating the wholesale activity from the main market -- allowing it either before the 9 a.m. opening or at a different location.

"We're all of us interested in helping the farmers, but we need to separate the two," Avery said. "That's what has to happen in a very nice, positive kind of way. Certainly, we're victims of too much good stuff, of too many happy customers. But I think we can make it work."

March 16, 2008 New York Times
Leaving Behind the Trucker Hat
By ALLEN SALKIN
Tivoli, N.Y.

THEIR Carhartts are no longer ironic. Now they have real dirt on them.

Until three years ago, Benjamin Shute was living in Williamsburg, where he kept Brooklyn Lager in his refrigerator and played darts in a league.

Raised on the Upper East Side by a father who is a foundation executive and a mother who writes about criminal justice, Mr. Shute graduated from Amherst and worked for an antihunger charity. But something nagged at him. To learn about food production, he had volunteered at a farm in Massachusetts. He liked the dirt, the work and the coaxing of land long fallow into producing eggplant and garlic.

He tried growing strawberries on his roof in Brooklyn, but it didn’t scratch his growing itch.

And so last week, Mr. Shute could be found here, elbow-deep in wet compost two hours north of New York City, filling greenhouse trays for onion seeds. Along with a partner, Miriam Latzer, he runs Hearty Roots, a 25-acre organic farm.

“I never thought I wanted to farm,” Mr. Shute said. “But it feels like an honest living.”

His partner, Ms. Latzer (the two are not a couple) is 33 and a former urban planner. Her parents, a professor and a librarian, “think its crazy that I’m a farmer,” she said. “They wonder what planet I came from.”

This one. Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms (see the E. coli spinach outbreaks), the perils of relying on petroleum to deliver food over long distances (see global warming) and the beauty of greenmarkets (see the four-times-weekly locavore cornucopia in Union Square), some young urbanites are starting to put their muscles where their pro-environment, antiglobalization mouths are. They are creating small-scale farms near urban areas hungry for quality produce and willing to pay a premium.

“Young farmers are an emerging social movement,” said Severine von Tscharner Fleming, 26, who is making a documentary called “The Greenhorns” about the trend.

While this is hardly the first time that idealistic young people wanted to get back to the garden, the current crop have advantages over their forebears from the 1960s and 70s, many of whom, inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog or Wendell Berry’s books about agrarian values, headed to the country, only to find it impossible to make a living.

But the growing market for organic and locally grown produce is making it possible for well-run small farms to thrive, said Ken Meter, 58, who studies the economics of food as an analyst at the Crossroads Resource Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for local food initiatives that is based in Minnesota.

“A lot of people in our 20s went to the land and wanted to farm and had a lot of enthusiasm, but not many resources,” he said. “It has only been the last five years where the payment from working your fingers to the bone and supplying urban markets with high-quality produce has been enough where you could imagine making a living.”

Whether young, first-generation farmers constitute a flood or trickle is difficult to say. But many long-time observers of small farms say they have noticed an increase in recent years among college graduates who want to farm, even if they intern at established farms or rent tiny parcels.

“We’ve had a big spike in the last decade and especially in the last few years of people who are new to farming applying to sell at Greenmarket,” said Gabrielle Langholtz, manager of special projects for the Manhattan-based Greenmarket, which runs 46 farmers’ markets around the city. “Maybe they went to liberal arts schools and read Michael Pollan,” she said, referring to the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” (Penguin Press HC, 2006), “and shopped at farmers markets and said, ‘I’m going to buy a farm upstate and sell to Greenmarket.’ ” The typical size of farms that sell at Greenmarket is 50 to 100 acres, she said.

Nationally, there were 8,493 certified organic farms in 2005, using just over 4 million acres of land, more than double the acreage in 2000, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. (The federal government introduced a uniform standard for organic certification in 2002.) New York had more than twice as many certified organic farms, 735, in 2007 as it did in 2004, according to the state Department of Agriculture and Markets. The agency estimates there are three to five times that many organic farms in New York which, like Hearty Roots, choose not to spend the $500 to $1,000 it costs to become certified.

Put that together with research indicating organic farmers are on average 46 years old, compared with an average of 52 for all farmers, and the numbers seem to reflect what experts say they see in the field: the demand from consumers for food produced on a small scale, bought directly from farmers, has allowed a younger generation to enter farming, even as global markets drive many conventional farmers off the land.

“It has opened up a better opportunity than we’ve had in a while for entry-level farmers,” said Stephen R. Gliessman, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies sustainable agriculture. He said many of his students in recent years have started farms after graduation.

When Mr. Shute led a seminar called, “So you want to be a farmer?” in December in New York, it was standing room only with over 40 people, he said.

Just a few years ago the prevailing style statement in Williamsburg featured metrosexually groomed urbanites wearing trucker hats and pristine Carhartt jackets and quaffing Pabst beer. Now some are choosing the real life behind the pose.

At a recent fund-raising party for Ms. Fleming’s film, in a warehouse next to the Williamsburg Bridge, men in shaggy beards and women in thick sandals sipped Sixpoint Lager from mason jars and snacked on Crane Mountain chèvre.

Guests included Rachel Mark and Betsy Devine, who own Salvatore Brooklyn, a cheese maker in Boerum Hill, and Rick and Michael Mast, tall brothers with Amish-length beards, who are starting a chocolate factory in Williamsburg.

The Billyburg scene has changed, said Annaliese Griffin, who contributes to a blog called Grocery Guy. “Having a cool cheese in your fridge has taken the place of knowing what the cool band is, or even of playing in that band,” she said. “Our rock stars are ricotta makers.”

When John Bliss and Stacy Brenner, both 34, first moved to Maine to farm seven years ago — Mr. Bliss from Tucson, and Ms. Brenner from Philadelphia — they knew little about farming.

“My lesson learned from that first year was that if the soil is good, it won’t let you down,” Mr. Bliss said.

On their Broadturn Farm, in Scarborough, they plan to raise sheep, chickens, pigs and turkeys along with vegetables this year. Like many new organic farms, Broadturn uses the Community Supported Agriculture model to survive. Such businesses sell food subscriptions that entitle consumers to weekly boxes of produce in season. Broadturn’s 20-week subscription costs $500.

Mr. Bliss and Ms. Brenner moved to their current site last year after winning a bid to rent a parcel on the outskirts of Portland controlled by a land trust seeking to preserve open space.

A similar set-up is what allowed Ian Calder-Piedmonte, a philosophy major from Cornell University, to join three years ago with a former classmate who had started Balsam Farms on 60 acres on the South Fork of Long Island. For about $150 an acre, they lease town land across from East Hampton high school, and the Peconic Land Trust leases them acreage in Amagansett, where they operate a farm stand on Town Lane.

“If we can find affordable housing, which is a challenge in East Hampton,” said Mr. Piedmont, 28, who spent two years in Italy after graduation, “we’re going to have two interns this summer.”

Although publications like Small Farmer’s Journal, published since 1976, often present the life of the small farmer in a heartwarmingly “Little House on the Prairie” light, a recent article in Sheep! about the dangers of jackals and one in Backyard Poultry about preventing chickens’ drinking water from freezing, are a reminder of the old-school risks of farming.

“We lost all of our soybeans last year to Japanese beetles,” Ms. Latzer said. She often wakes up at 5 a.m. and collapses into an exhausted sleep by 9 p.m. She earns enough to afford health insurance, but if the landlord doesn’t renew their five-year lease, the enterprise could become untenable.

A number of colleges have added organic farming classes because of demand from students. “A lot of them come out and realize they’re not cut out for it,” said John Biernbaum, a professor of horticulture in Michigan State’s new one-year certificate program. Last year, the first, there were 9 students. This year, 18.

Some feel the strong tug of the land. On March 1, KayCee Wimbish, 32, a former second-grade teacher, moved from her Harlem apartment up to Tivoli to raise sheep and chickens with Owen O’Connor, 22, a Wesleyan dropout who helped come up with the name of their enterprise, Awesome Farm.

Ms. Wimbish grew up in Tulsa, Okla., a child of the suburbs, and it wasn’t until she moved to New York that she discovered farmers’ markets and the politics of food. She worked the last two summers at Hearty Roots and became hooked on the agrarian life. “Moving to New York City,” she said, “was what first got me interested in food and farming.”

Source: New York Times >>

Railroad Street Youth Project's Culinary Arts Program

Dine With the Railroad Street Youth Project!

March 24--Guest chefs include our Level 2 students under the direction of The Red Lion Inn Executive Chef Brian Alberg
March 31--Guest chef Terry Moore, The Old Mill, Egremont, MA
April 7--Guest chef Luis Zambrano, Viva, Glendale, MA

Tickets to each dinner are $50/pp and directly benefit RSYP's Culinary Arts Program!

All dinners seat at 6pm at Pearl's in Great Barrington. To make a reservation, contact Steve at RSYP, 528-2475 or steve@rsyp.org.

EPA may exempt factory farms from emissions reporting

"Factory farms may not be held accountable for toxic gas emissions if the Evironmental Protection Agency (EPA) decides to change the current reporting requirements. Although the EPA acknowldeges that factory farm emissions are linked to public health concerns of nearby workers and residents, agriculture industry lobbyists are encourgaing the EPA to drop reporting requirements based on claims that the reports are not being used. Without these reports rural communities will not have much to hold these factory farms accountable for the pollution that they produce. The EPA is accepting public comments on this issue until March 28, 2008."

This is quoted from the Community Food Security Coalition newsletter. For more info visit:
www.foodsecurity.org

My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)

March 1, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor to the NY Times

By JACK HEDIN

Rushford, Minn.

"IF you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.

But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.

As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.

Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.

All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix."

to read more, copy and paste this link into your browser:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/opinion/01hedin.html?ei=5070&en=f572f35fb6160317&ex=1205038800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print

WHERE'S THE BEEF? or better: Where's the beef FROM?

Atlantic contributors follow the decline of the meat industry by Nathan Deuel

The American Way of Beef

These days, the thought of ingesting hamburger gives many people pause. Massive beef recalls and books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation have impressed upon readers' minds the image of the modern beef cow, packed tightly in an enormous feedlot, standing in a cesspool of its brethren's manure as it gorges itself on an excessively medicated mix of corn and rendered animal protein. Although livestock diseases have devastated farms in Europe, American factory farming has earned an especially bad name for its carelessness and inhumanity. As B. R. Myers wrote in his May 2005 Atlantic piece "If Pigs Could Swim," "Livestock are treated better in Europe because Europeans want them treated better. They are treated worse here because we hardly think of them at all. It's as simple as that."

Over the years, other Atlantic contributors have made note of America's declining meat standards and suggested alternatives to the federally subsidized farm industry, where the typical cow lives a short and unhappy life that leaves consumers with cheap, fatty slabs of beef. In "Back to Grass," his article in the May 2003 Atlantic, Corby Kummer makes a case for grass-fed beef—meat obtained from cattle that have been allowed to roam free throughout their lives and to sustain themselves on their natural diet of grass and silage. Beef raised in this way, he explains, not only tastes better, but is also leaner and more healthful. ...

Such nostalgia for traditional ranching methods is not new. In "Caesar's Meat" (September 1960), J. Frank Dobie recalled the tasty steaks of yesteryear.

copy and paste the link to read more
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200710u/beef-flashback

Join Us March 12, 2008, call for reservations

CLOSING THE FOOD GAP

visit www.markwinne.com

What a book! Quite thought provoking. Winne wants us to "reset the table in the Land of Plenty." How do we close the gap between those of us eating better, more nutritious local foods and others of us who have to get on a bus to get to a supermarket?

“‘Closing the Food Gap’ is a deeply moving account of Mark Winne’s long career as an advocate for policies that will ensure adequate nutrition for the poor.

"Reading this book should make everyone want to advocate for food systems that will feed the hungry, support local farmers, and promote community democracy-all at the same time.”


-Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, and author of Food Politics and What to Eat

for more information, please copy and paste in this link: www.markwinne.com