Come the Revolution

Archive for the ‘Farming’ Category

We’ve got a good crop of aphid-eating lady beetles in the garden this year. On the one hand, that means we have aphids. On the other hand, it means nature is doin’ its beautiful, balance-keeping thing.

We’re ready. And by “ready,” I mean relatively prepared for all the successes and failures that make up a farming life.

When we moved to Vermont just over a year ago, there wasn’t much we were sure of. We knew that we had work, from mid-April through October, at an organic vegetable farm; we knew we had an affordable apartment with a month-to-month lease; we knew we had each other. Beyond that, a lot of things were up in the air.

For starters, I didn’t know for certain that I would even like farming. I had a hunch that I would, but then I’d also once had a hunch that I’d really like haggis (and I’ll just let you guess how that one turned out). I knew that it would be hard work, and that my wimpy citified muscles and never-leave-home-without-it inhaler were a liability. There was a pretty good chance that I would stink at farm work. Could I hack it?

We also had no idea how long we’d be staying in Vermont. When the season was over, would we be able to find other work? Would we even want to stay in this area? Where would we go next?

The season came and went, and it was as hard as I expected. But I made it through, proved a valuable member of the team (most days), learned so much I felt like I was in grad school, and oh hey — I loved it. I won’t say I loved every minute of it, because there were some minutes that felt like torture. Like, for example, the many hundreds of minutes that we spent planting onions in the unseasonably cold, wet New England spring. Overall, though, it was a good experience, and that good experience has led us to the next step.

We’re looking for a little plot of land of our own.

We’re not looking to buy property right now. Our finances are such that five years ago, someone would’ve certainly tried to sell us on one of those infamous adjustable rate mortgages; now most bankers would probably look at us and laugh. We’re doing respectably well, and might even qualify for a USDA-funded loan, but we see no sense in rushing into a purchase that might not be exactly what we need.

Instead, we’re looking into leasing opportunities in the areas we’d most like to live and work. We’re putting together a business plan, investigating niche markets, and preparing want-ads for local papers. We’re scanning the agricultural internet for opportunities that fit our needs.

Cian, ever the realist, is anxious that I not get my heart set on having our own land to work by next spring, but then he had the same concerns a year and a half ago when we were looking for somewhere to apprentice. I have phenomenal luck and a knack for landing in just the right place, with a little help from friends and providence. So here it is, the official announcement: we’re looking for our Ten Acres Enough, and I just know we’re going to find it.

We received a copy of this book — an original edition, no less — as a gift from friends last week. I found this passage especially lovely:

There is no home like the farm home. And with the incomparable charm of rural home life comes the infinite pleasure of creative effort and the exhilaration of contending with nature and winning bread from the bare ground. There are a constancy and a stability about it all. There is something to build on, something to look forward to in the years to come. [. . . ] Some people in the cities have an idea that farm work is not an “elevating” occupation, but I want to say to you, my friends, with all the earnestness of which I am capable, that agriculture is one of the most dignified employments in which a man can engage.

-Edward Owen Dean, Opportunities in Farming

The federal animal-tracking program NAIS would have been a disaster for small-scale farmers and homesteaders; the grassroots No-NAIS movement turned it into a PR nightmare for the USDA. Last week, Ag Sec’y Tom Vilsack proposed a new, more flexible program. Read on for details.

A NAIS history lesson

Way back in the day, some people at USDA dreamed up NAIS — a National Animal Identification System. While the intention — track disease, protect farms with good practices and hold others accountable– may have been noble, NAIS was the farming equivalent of “using a hatchet where you need a scalpel” (as a certain President might put it). NAIS would have required farmers, homesteaders and even pet owners to register their animals with the government, tag them, track and report their movements (across state borders, not around the farm), and submit yearly paperwork and fees.

The expense of the fees and tagging equipment would have driven many small farmers out of business. Others would have chosen to operate illegally under the radar. Beyond the expense, there was a principle at stake: Small producers were being punished for Big Ag’s bad behavior, and the effect would be to drive what little competition feedlot farms have out of business.

And there’s also that whole government-oversight thing. I bet you can guess how most farmers feel about that.

NAIS first came on the scene in Spring of 2005 and was supposed to be fully implemented by now, but USDA began backing off (thanks to major grassroots opposition) as early as April, 2006. Last week, USDA announced that NAIS is dead in the water, and a new program is slated to take its place.

Animal Disease Traceability Framework

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack proposed a new program to replace NAIS. Here are some basics of the proposal:

• After the Feds work with states to create a minimum standard, the details and administration of the program will be left to individual states. Records will also be owned and maintained at the state, rather than the federal, level.
• Only producers whose animals will be moved in “interstate commerce” will be subject to the new framework. Homesteaders and most small farmers will be exempt, including those selling live animals at local markets.
• Whereas NAIS required the use of expensive and excessive electronic chip identifiers, states will decide what forms of ID are officially required under the new framework. Visual tags and brands will be an acceptable possibility.
• Much of the $120 million already spent on NAIS paid for elements that will be useful under the new framework as well — IT infrastructure, for example, and NAIS electronic tags that have already been implemented under the voluntary program.

You can read more details at USDA’s Animal Disease Traceability site. USDA hopes to issue a proposed rule for the federal minimum requirements next winter, at which time they’ll offer a 90-day comment period. No need to wait until then to make your opinion heard, though — get in touch with your state veterinarian [pdf] to let them know what you think of the new proposed framework.

GM-crop producing, seed patent-owning, farmer-suing Monstanto Corporation owns the seed company that supplies Burpee, Johnny’s and other favorite providers with some of their most popular seeds. Keep reading for details.

It’s seed catalog season. I poured over our Johnny’s catalog for an hour and a half last week, reading each and every description and fantasizing about spring. Later, leafing through the catalog for a second time himself, Cian said “I just want to grow everything. Even the cover-crops!”

I know we aren’t the only ones lusting after green growing things right now, and I’m sure it’s a boon to seed companies that farmers and gardeners order their seeds in the depths of winter, when we’re planting imaginary gardens that would put out more produce than we could ever use (if we even had the space for them).

Which is why now is an important time to ask if Monsanto will own your garden this year.*

In 2005, Monsanto bought a multinational corporation called Seminis, which produces and distributes more than 3,000 varieties of popular garden seeds. I mean really popular seeds; over the years they’ve distributed such well-known varieties as Early Girl and Better Boy tomatoes, Red Sails lettuce and Red Knight bell peppers.

Because of Seminis’ market share, it’s difficult for the seed companies we love to stop selling them altogether. The Organic Seed Alliance reports that

Seminis’ varieties account for 11 percent of Fedco Seed’s gross sales, and the numbers are much higher in categories like melons and squash. While Fedco founder C.R. Lawn expressed his personal inclination to have nothing to do with Monsanto, the volume of sales demands careful consideration.

(Fedco has since dropped all Seminis varieties.)

To keep Monsanto out of your garden this season, avoid buying seed produced by Monsanto-Seminis — and ask your gardener friends to do the same. The list of varieties they produce is too long for me to list here, but you can use Seminis’ website to research specific varieties. Make sure you look at products for both home gardeners and professional growers.

Johnny’s currently carries 21 varieties produced by Monsanto-Seminis, and they’re working on phasing out those varieties as suitable replacements are found. They sent Emily of Eat Close to Home this list of all the products in their catalog currently supplied by Monsanto-Seminis:

• 103 SIERRA BLANCA onion
• 224 FREMONT cauliflower
• 240 HANSEL eggplant
• 241 GRETEL eggplant
• 568 BISCAYNE pepper
• 642 DULCE pepper
• 733 CELEBRITY tomatoes
• 2038 KING ARTHUR pepper
• 2063 BIG BEEF tomatoes
• 2212 PRIZEWINNER pumpkin
• 2260 FAIRY TALE eggplant
• 2309 X3R RED KNIGHT pepper
• 2365 ORANGE SMOOTHIE pumpkin
• 2368 PATTY GREEN TINT summer squash
• 2894 SERRANO DEL SOL pepper
• 2954 CHEDDAR cauliflower
• 2991 CANDY onion
• 122 BEAUFORT tomatoes
• 2794 GERONIMO tomatoes
• 2700 MAXIFORT tomatoes
• 2373 TRUST tomatoes

Alternately, you could get your seeds from one of the many distributors that isn’t supplied by The Devil Monsanto; High Mowing Seeds, Fedco, Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek are all good examples, and Botanical Interests, whose first-ever print catalog comes out very soon, carries only one Monsanto-Seminis variety (the “celebrity” tomato).

Monsanto has their fingers in our food system every step of the way — and if we’re not careful, before long it’ll be their food system. Check out The Organic Consumers Associations’ Millions Against Monsanto campaign for more.

*I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. Monsanto doesn’t own your garden unless you try to save seeds from one of their products. Then, watch out — they might come after you.

A few months back I read an amazing book. It’s called Larding the Lean Earth by Steven Stoll. The reading is relatively dense, but it’s filled with history and an expert analysis of the conversations of the earlier half of the 19th Century with regard to improving soils through on-farm natural means versus taking what one could from a plot. Essentially the entire book is about manure either directly or indirectly. I realize this won’t excite so many people (and of those it would, Freud or Kraft-Ebbing would have had quite a bit of fun with you).

Since the time of Washington, if not before, there have been serious, voiced concerns of the lessening fertility of American soils. Without fertile soil, tilled in perpetuity, argued many men of that time through today, civilization loses its footing. Many farmers of the time “prefer[ed] to rethink agriculture rather than remake their world on the frontier” where the soils were more fertile.

“At the center of these concerns stood a pile of dung. Unattractive and strange to the uninitialized but a stern monument to those who knew its ways, dung held great power. If improvement and all that it stood for had a single symbol, it was this—the steaming excrement that completed a circle in the land large enough to enclose the riches of rural life, strong enough to make the farm equal in strength to the changes taking place in the upstart sectors of the post-1812 economy. If the farm would stand with manufacturing or against it, one thing was certain: it would have to make manure. And to those who claimed that the glory of the United States lay in the West and that the unceasing exploitation of soil would result in a prosperous nation, the dunghill argued otherwise. Onto this single hot and aromatic structure improvers heaped all their hopes and goals: a permanent rural society, the leadership of responsible elites, a countryside distinguished for its beauty and neatness, the application of reason to artifice, and various desires for integration or isolation from the wider world all of it seemed possible when dung got mixed up with soil. The dunghill seemed to offer a way out of the paradox of a declining environment that would provide the raw material for an economic revival. At the moment they realized that agriculture had resulted in widespread degradation, farmers all over Atlantic America came to believe that the same soil could bear a great deal of economic and political weight.”

How could you argue with that?

Larding the Lean Earth has led to a few more books on my bookshelf (albeit mostly temporarily from the public library) about manure and humanure or night soil (the polite names for human feces when it becomes productive waste). They have all been interesting, but none as historically significant and humbling as Larding the Lean Earth. In the hopes that I will write about all of them, consider this Poop Post 1.

I know more farmers than most folks. Likely even more than most people training to be farmers. Part of this is that I’ve somehow managed to land jobs in agriculture where I am given the opportunity to meet friends and collegues of my employers. This past Spring I met a fairly young farmer in New York whose name is Greg. He took three years of apprenticeships at the beginning of his 8 year history of farming, landing him right around 30 years of age. He is friendly and curious and, without question, the best connected farmer I’ve ever met. Greg also happens to be the director of NOFA-NY.

Greg looks pretty standard for the image of farmers that I’ve run across. He’s fairly young (as opposed to the Baby Boomer age that is the average for farmers in the US all told), eager, smart, and knowledgeable. I could use those same four words to describe all of the supervisors I’ve had on farms and most of the friends of theirs that I’ve met. This is particularly odd, as the average age of farmers in this country is over 50, but also heartening because it means there’s a new generation of who are aiming to take over for these older farmers. It’s a great image to have to replace what it seems urbanites give to rural folks- you can see some great descriptions of this image in the book Country Matters by Michael Korda- one of old fat men with flannel shirts under their overalls, sporting John Deere hats and being particularly dull as human beings.

I don’t for a moment believe this image of farmers and encourage others not to, either. Whether conventional or organic growers, farmers need to be jacks of all trades- chemists for the pesticides they use, homespun vets if they have animals, tender plant surgeons in the greenhouse, meteorologists, biologists, botanists, and mechanics, as well as being good at sales and marketing. Many have degrees in subjects other than agriculture, many others have at least one degree in soil science or agriculture. Some have other businesses or jobs in addition to farming, and unfortunate necessity for many to be able to have health insurance and make ends meat. The amount of energy and multitasking required is impressive. You show me a farmer who is completely dull and unintelligent and I will show you a farmer who is not the standard in, and probably not very good at, his profession.

It also must be said that women are stepping up in agriculture. Huge numbers of women have become more involved, even as their areas edge toward development. Although the number of farmers has gone down over the past few years (indeed the past two hundred years), women have been percentage wise and numerically more represented over the past decade.

Images: Farmer, by docman; A Real Farmer by Jerry Reynolds.

I was reading yet another article about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and thought a post on that topic was a bit overdue. I guess I’m tired of seeing it everywhere and didn’t think it would be all that interesting to post about. What caught my attention today and made me rethink this lack of bee talk was that yet another “possible cause” was listed in this article. It seems each article puts out its own “possible cause,” as though only one choice will really affect the bees at all. In reality, bees are a very suceptible and sensitive group of species, and the honeybee is an especially sensitive one in some ways. Part of the reason for this may be that the honeybee is a domesticated European animal, and being in the Americas by itself is not what the animal is wired for.

As for the possible reasons for CCD:

Radio Waves- There was a concern a while back that the cell phones and other constant presence of radio waves would confuse bees. This seems to not be a big factor because colonies in areas with no cell phone service and extremely limited ability to pick up radio or television broadcasts are just as affected as those in areas with heavy cell phone use and multiple radio stations.

Monocrops- Having only one crop, especially when that’s the only crop for miles and miles in every direction, leads to a desert in terms of food for bees. During a short period of time every plant is in bloom, such as in an apple orchard in the spring, and then there are virtually no blooms for the rest of the year. One flood of blossoms cannot sustain a colony. Because of this type of desert a lot of large monocrop establishments rent bees.

Rented Hives- These hives often travel hundreds of miles between crops. Not only does this stress the bees in general, but there’s a good chance they won’t find any food along these long drives. Fasting, essentially, for a few days or weeks while traveling could easily stress individual bees to the point of death or exhaustion (wherein they don’t return to the hive); at a colony level this is almost expected. As prarie lands are being converted to agricultural land, such as in Colorado this season, the plethora of flowers that give these colonies renewed energy between crops are no longer available, and we can only expect more colonies to suffer the unfortunate fate of CCD.

Mixed Hives- At monocrop fields and even the resting places, colonies from all over are put in the same field. The bees don’t go into the wrong hives, but they interact outside of them. This makes these large gatherings similar to a kindergarten in that if one kid has lice, that is if one bee has mites, they’re all going to get mites.

Pesticides- Heavy spraying of pesticides, especially with crops that are routinely sprayed regularly and heavily (i.e. apples) during the season, may effect the hives in the area. I am close to a farm that has both bees (rented, here only for a few weeks of course), and sprays every few days. Some pesticides are specific, they only (or at least, we think they only) effect certain pests, leaving beneficial insects untouched; some are broad spectrum, effecting many or all the insects interacting with the chemical.

Systemic Pesticides- These are a special kind of broad-spectrum pesticide that is actually within the plant. One of the ways that its effects have been described to me is that these pesticides confuse insects so they don’t know that they ought to (biologically speaking) eat or damage the plant (from an agriculture perspective). There’s nothing to say that these don’t also confuse bees, limiting their knowledge of how to get back to the hive. Organics don’t use systemic pesticides, but they can use something called “surround,” which provides a level of confusion to the insect (due to standing in sticky clay-covered leaves) ‘distracting’ from their intended purpose of damaging (or fertilizing) the plant.

photo by cdw9

Aww…

Last night, NPR’s All Things Considered discussed the recent republican ploy apparently newsworthy issue of Obama’s comparison of McCain and W’s positions. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig, he said: it’s still a pig. Then, even though McCain had said the same thing about Hillary Clinton’s health care platform mere months ago, someone at the McCain camp thought it would be a brilliant idea to take the phrase out of context and make it sound like Obama had in fact been referring to the Repub’s vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin.

I am so disgusted by politics at this point that none of this surprises me, and I almost turned the radio off. I’m glad I didn’t — I would have missed this absurd clip of Joel Salatin (of Polyface Farm in Swoope, VA) putting lipstick on a pig. Literally.

It’s so funny that whenever mainstream media talks about Salatin, they say “Made famous by Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” The farmer had written half a dozen books by the time Pollan’s book came out — he’s been famous in certain circles for a long, long time. I wonder who he’ll vote for? He strikes me as a libertarian, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he voted for McCain.

For the record: Salatin told NPR that when you put lipstick on a pig? It is, in fact, still a pig.

Photo: johnmuk.