Bioneers

Beyond The Barcode: The Local Food Revolution

bioneers admin — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:46:01 +0000

"Our food, in the vision of the globalizers and the vision of the total economy, will come from wherever in the world it can be produced most cheaply, freeing American labor and land for higher uses. I frankly don’t know what higher use there is for labor and land than growing food" … Michael Pollan

by Michael Pollan

Much of my education and the hopes for transforming our food chain I owe to a Bioneer—Joel Salatin. When I was first writing about organic agriculture and the gradual industrialization of what had been organic agriculture, I spoke to Kenny, and he said you really need to talk to one of the most important critics of organic agriculture, Joel Salatin. I called him, first to get some salty quotes about Whole Foods and the Organic Empire as he calls it, and I’d heard about this wonderful pastured chicken and grass-fed beef he was raising. So I’d hoped he would send me a chicken or a steak.

Well, I got the salty quotes I was looking for. He went on about the clash of paradigms and the Western conquistador mentality that was ruining our food system—both organic and industrial—but when I asked him for a chicken he said, “Sorry I can’t do that.”

“What? You’re not set up for shipping? I could have the FedEx man come with the dry ice and the box and the whole thing.”

He said, “No, no, you don’t get it. I don’t believe it’s organic or sustainable to FedEx meat across the country. If you want to try my meat, you have to come down here to Virginia.” Which I promptly did. Thus began my education in one of the most interesting agricultures going on in this country. I won’t walk you through it. I just want to give you a little close-up vignette because something I saw on that farm was a real paradigm shift for me. I think it holds the kernel of a completely different way of looking at our relationship with nature.

Joel calls himself a grass farmer. If you ask him are you a rancher, or chicken farmer, an egg farmer, he’ll say, “I’m a grass farmer.” When I got to the farm he insisted before I met any of his animals that I get down on the ground and meet his grass. And he explained something very interesting as to what happened. He grows these six different animals in a very complex rotation. It’s kind of an animal rotation based on manures and grubs and all that kind of stuff. As soon as the grass is sheared by the ruminant, the grass plant does something that all gardeners understand. It strives to restore its root/shoot ratio. It strives to balance the root mass with the leaf mass that it’s lost. So it promptly sheds as much root as grass, that has been eaten by the cow.

That’s a very interesting process. Essentially it’s killing off its roots. What happens to those roots? Mycelium goes to work along with the bacteria and protozoa and they break down those roots. That is precisely how soil is made. We build soil from the bottom up. And that is how the prairies were made, in a reciprocal relationship between the bison and the grass and all the wilderness of life that takes place in the earth’s stomach—the soil.

Joel adds to this kind of pulsing of the pasture, the element of bringing in the chickens to add nitrogen to it and within six weeks the grass is back and you can run it again. And the key thing to know here is that at the end of the year he has taken off an immense amount of animal protein from his farm. 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 10,000 broilers, 1200 turkeys, 1000 rabbits, 35,000 dozen eggs from 100 acres. If anyone asks can organic feed the world, take him to this farm. There is no question that sustainable agriculture can feed the world when it is done right.

The really important thing to remember is that at the end of that year when all that food has come off this land, there is more soil, not less. There is more biodiversity, not less. There is more fertility, not less.

Now, why is that significant? It’s significant because most of us carry in our heads a model of our relationship to nature that is zero sum. That is, for us to get what we want from nature—whether it’s oil, energy, whether it’s food, whether it’s entertainment—nature is diminished. We assume this to be true. We see examples of it all around. What a well managed pasture shows is that it is not necessarily the case. There is a non-zero sum way for us to engage with the natural world. And for me that is one of the most hopeful things I’ve observed in 25 years about writing about the human relationship with nature.

I don’t have time to go through my whole Paris Hilton adventure. I worked on the farm as a farm hand for a week and it was a brutally difficult week. I want to go right to some of the lessons that came out of this.

In challenging the zero sum idea, it’s not just about our relationship to nature. It is also challenging our zero sum attitude toward economics. I want to move to economics and politics and put forth the proposition that some of the most important politics going on in this country today are being transacted at farmer’s markets.

There is a direct line from the kind of healthy soils underneath Joel Salatin’s farm and other farms like his too, as Albert Howard reminded us a long time ago—a link from those healthy soils to healthy plants to healthy animals to healthy eaters and healthy economies.

I think local food is one of the most important political movements going on. It’s much bigger than food. It is the most important protest against what Wendell Berry has called, “the rise of the total economy.” The total economy is the globalized world in which everything is a commodity. Everything is produced wherever it can be produced most cheaply, which is to say most destructively, of people and resources, and moved to wherever it can be sold most dearly. This is zero sum food economy. It means more cheap food for us, less for the soil, less for the workers and much less for the animals.

Make no mistake: under this regime—and this is the regime of free trade and food that we’re hearing is so important—food is about to go the way of clothing, of consumer electronics.

Our food, in the vision of the globalizers and the vision of the total economy, will come from wherever in the world it can be produced most cheaply, freeing American labor and land for higher uses. I frankly don’t know what higher use there is for labor and land than growing food. But in the view of the economist, people like Steven Blank at UC Davis, American’s farming is like Ph.D.’s doing child’s play. This is the technocratic vision.

Now make no mistake: organic food is on the same path today, as organic food has gotten industrialized. We found a product such as Stonyfield Organic Yogurt made from organic milk powder from New Zealand, strawberries from China, apple purée from Turkey, blueberries from Canada. We are in the age of organic feedlots, organic factory farms. These are words that were never meant to be attached to one another.

Local food economies are our best hope for checking the drift toward the total global economy. And food is where these economies begin. A revolt is underway across this country. A revolt of the small producers and consumers and some of the most important politics today, as I said, are happening at the farmer’s market.

Now we’re told all this is very sentimental to go back to a local food economy, even reactionary. And surely there are reasons for buying local that might strike the unsentimental as a little softheaded. We like the idea of keeping farmers and their wisdom in our communities. We like eating food in season picked at the peak of its taste and nutritional value. You find no processed food, no high fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market. We like the idea of keeping land near us in production for food rather than houses and strip malls, defending the landscapes we love.

We like what happens socially at the farmer’s market, which is quickly emerging as the new public square in this country. If you compare what happens in the aisles at the grocery store with the farmer’s market, think about what a world of difference that is. At the farmer’s market country meets city. Children are introduced to where their food comes from. They learn often for the first time that a carrot is not a glossy orange bullet that comes in a plastic bag, but is actually a root. How amazing!

People politic. They have petitions. They schmooze. It’s just an incredibly vibrant space. We like how the farmer’s market or CSA lets us reconnect through these plants, animals and their farmers to the natural world. We’ve always looked to food for that connection. Food will always give us that connection. Even the Twinkie has its origins in the natural world. It’s only obscure to us.

I’m fully prepared to defend local food on those so-called sentimental grounds. But I would point out here that all those benefits suggest this is a non zero sum economic relationship, or social relationship. There is a lot more is going on in that marketplace than the exchange of money for food.

But let me move briefly on to other ground. Let me move on to their ground. Let me suggest that it is the globalizers of food that are the real sentimentalists who are, as Wendell Barry says, “acting on a faith without any justification,” very much like the Soviet Communists, the last great destroyers of global food economies. They tell us we need to sacrifice things we like here and now—landscapes, relationships, local enterprises—for a promise of future prosperity, that we must break a few eggs to make an omelet.

What could be more unrealistic, more soft headed than to propose we should destroy things we have and love in the present for the uncertain prospect of some future benefit? Let me remind you that the Soviet Union was founded precisely on the issue of food. Let’s stick with the eggs. Let’s not make this omelet. Let me suggest that there’s nothing more hardheaded or realistic than building and defending local food economies. Indeed, to do so is a matter not of sentiment, but of critical importance to national security and public health. Let me quickly run through a couple of reasons.

Energy. The total economy depends on cheap energy, not to mention peace and no threat from terrorism, in order to move these goods from point of cheapest production to point of highest purchase. We will not reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy or confront the issue of climate change without dealing with this industrial food system. This food system is consuming 17% of our fossil fuel. That’s to grow the food with fossil fuel fertilizers, to use diesel on the farm, to use diesel to move the food and to process the food. You know the statistics. We’re moving all the food 1500 miles on average. By the way, supermarket organic food is moved even further today. You could buy local tulips in Seattle at Whole Foods. But in fact, they’ve been shipped down to a regional warehouse in California and then sent back to Seattle. This is the rationalization of our distribution system. There are people in Denmark eating American sugar cookies. And there are people in America eating Danish sugar cookies. As economist Herman Daly said, it would be much more efficient for them to swap recipes.

So energy is one reason to buy local. Sovereignty is another. Do we really want to go down the path we have gone down with our energy with food? Do we really want to find ourselves in a position where all our grain is coming from South America, our produce from Mexico? The projections right now are that in the state of California at the end of this century there will be no more food production in the Central Valley. It will be houses and highways wall to wall, mountain to mountain. Do we want to go down that path? Do we want to give away our food independence?

National security. Our government knows better than we the eaters the risk of a highly centralized food system. Tommy Thompson, when he left the Department of Homeland Security, in his last press conference, said something very interesting. He said, “I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” When all your hamburgers are being ground in the same factory. When all your salad is being washed in the same sink it is a very precarious way to eat.

This highly centralized food system is very vulnerable to contamination—both deliberate and accidental. And that brings me to the public health justification of local food. We just had a horrifying illustration of the dangers of centralized food. Two hundred Americans were seriously sickened and three Americans were killed by eating bad spinach. What does that have to do with local food? There are two senses in which that product was the result of our industrial system. First, that bug E. coli 0157:H7 is a mutation of industrial feedlot agriculture. That’s where that bug begins. You do not have that in grass-fed cattle. Second, that bug was able to be spread far and wide because you’re taking spinach, from many, many farms and you’re washing it literally in a single sink in San Juan Bautista, California, and then you’re sending it all over the country. This is not to say you couldn’t get sick from eating spinach at your farmer’s market. But if you did, nobody would hear about it because it wouldn’t be a national story. It would be contained in the food chain. You’d know who was responsible.

The response to this threat though, is going to be exactly wrong. Instead of seizing on this and the terrorist threat as a reason to decentralize our food supply—which it would be if there was any true concern for homeland security, exactly what the government would be endeavoring to do right now—we are bringing in more regulation and more technology. Progressive senators are proposing that we begin to regulate farms the way we regulate meat plants. You know what that will mean. That will put small farms out of business. So you see what happens as industrial agriculture fails and sickens us. The solutions promote more industrialization of agriculture. And that’s what we need to resist. We need to move in the other direction. They want to irradiate the food supply to keep us safe. I say we put our faith not in technology or regulation but in relationships, relationships with small farms.

It’s very interesting that at my farmer’s market spinach was doing just fine during this outbreak. People sense these things. They sense that buying food from someone they know, someone they trust, is okay. There may be some risk, but it’s a manageable risk. And that is one of the reasons I think that farmers markets and CSAs are the fastest growing sector of the food system. The number of farmers markets has doubled twice in the last decade. The size of this new rising market result is unmeasurable. It’s an underground economy. No one is paying taxes. In a way it’s much like the last days of Soviet agriculture. Fifty percent of the food supply was coming off small gardens, small underground markets. People simply went around the big system.

I want to talk about your vote. It’s true, when the government won’t protect our land, our communities, our food supply, our economy, we have to do it ourselves. We have to step out of the four ordained paths in the system. We have to act as consumer-citizens. We need a sense of what it means to be a consumer that is broader than the usual, that perceives being a consumer as a co-creator, a builder of food chains. We can build a local food economy. We are building a local food economy simply by getting out of the supermarket, by growing our own food, by joining the CSA and by shopping at farmers markets. All of this is important. We are voting with our forks and it is a very important vote.

We also need to vote with our votes because not all the changes we need can be driven by consumers. Some of them will have to come from government. Some of them will have to come from the change that only citizens can bring about.

I want to say a word about the most boring topic in American politics but possibly the most important, that is the farm bill. Understanding the farm bill is the hardest intellectual work I did in the course of writing The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It really makes my head hurt. But it is the rules of the system, of the game that we all eat by. It is the reason we are in this fast food nation, because the farm bill decides that we’re going to grow cheap corn and soybeans, which are not foods but which are raw materials for industrial food. The farm bill determines how hard it will be for a local meat processor to survive. The farm bill determines whether local or national foods will predominate.

None of us work on this issue. We leave it to the senator of Nebraska to negotiate with the senator from Iowa. We treat it as a parochial piece of legislation. The odds are, your legislators, your senators and representatives are trading their votes on this bill for other things they want. Why can they do that? Why can they get away with that? Because they’re not hearing from you that you care. This bill setting these rules is so critical to the future. We need to move away from feedlot agriculture toward local animal agriculture. That won’t happen without changes in the farm bill. We need to move from subsidizing cheap grain to helping people produce real food locally. The rules need to be rewritten. And it’s happening next year.

So I leave you with this totally unglamorous message: Let your senators and representatives know you’re paying attention and you care. Let them know that you understand that the farm bill is really a food bill. It is our fight. Unless we take it to them, they’re going to do the same thing again and we’re going to have more corn, and more soybeans, more Smithfields, more Cargills and fewer farmers markets. So please follow this fight and help to wage it.

This article is a transcript from a Bioneers presentation

The Maya Seed Ark Project

bioneers admin — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:41:04 +0000

An Interview with The Maya Seed Ark Project founder Camila Martinez, who is establishing seed banks in Central America and educating Maya people about the risks of genetically engineered seeds

Interview by Arty Mangan

ARTY: Why is biodiversity important, and why specifically is the Maya region important?

CAMILA: The Mezzo-American biological corridor, which the Maya inhabit, is one of three top places in the world with the greatest biodiversity on the planet. It contains the largest jungle north of the Amazon, the Peten Jungle, which is great source of oxygen for people in the US, as well as for all the inhabitants of that region, where there are 13 million Maya people. It includes Southern Mexico, Belize and Guatemala and part of Honduras.

ARTY: Tell me about the Maya Seed Ark Project

CAMILA: The Maya Seed Ark project is really a first line of defense against the food crisis, which has really already hit the Maya considerably, because of climatic conditions changing and crop failure, as well as the incredible dumping on the Maya peoples of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Hundreds of thousands of tons of corn are being annually exported from the United States into Central America into Maya land, which is greatly affecting their food supply and their way of agriculture. So the Maya Seed Ark Project is working to get out the word about genetically modified organisms into communities where they haven’t gotten any information. We are providing information translated into the various Mayan languages because many of those people do not speak Spanish.

There are a number of seed banks that are now being established to forestall the food crisis. The movement is growing in the Maya communities. The governments of those countries have no back up for food security in those regions. The Mexican government might have a few locations with some seed materials, but certainly it’s not covering the entire country. Really, Maya land is another planet from central Mexico. It’s very, very far away from the capital, Mexico City. Literally, it’s like the natives are on their own, as they always have been. So it’s definitely a community effort.

ARTY: Are there any attempts at creating GMO-free zones?

CAMILA: Not that I know of. There’s been tremendous pressure on the governments by Monsanto and its subsidiaries for these countries to import all of these different facets of genetically modified organisms.

I have gone into extremely remote areas and have seen GMOs in all them. You have to make a pretty big effort to get to some of these areas, which illustrates the amount of distribution of GMOs that’s going on.

There has been, in certain areas, a huge resistance, but not everywhere. In some places people just don’t know about it and there’s been such a phenomenal disinformation campaign that has been put on in Central America by the seed companies. GMOs come in from many other countries in packages that are not labeled or labels not translated.

ARTY: Can you describe some of the seed banks?

CAMILA: There are several places in Belize and Guatemala that are growing heirloom seeds out. One of the initial seed banks that is really up and functioning is a beautiful one in the Lake Atitlan region. This was not established by the Maya Seed Ark Project, but they are supporting the Seed Ark Project. There’s another really wonderful one that has been established in Belize that is now growing out some of the seeds at risk- native Maya heirloom seeds that are on the verge of extinction.

Maya are agriculturalists. They understand about seed, not just the Maya but all native peoples, because many have had to subsist this way for many, many generations. There’s a proper understanding of what’s going on.

The seed banks are run by exchange. People make deposits and withdrawals. People that are given the seed to grow out, they repay in kind. It’s a way to keep it flowing. And, of course, who better then themselves to identify what’s disappearing.

The Seed Ark Project has gone to the village elders that worked with a lot of very knowledgeable Maya who have been in agriculture for a long time and know what they’re looking at. We’re getting counsel from them and also from the Councils of the Spiritual Guides, of whom many are farmers in those countries. It’s been exceedingly helpful in guiding the way that the project is evolving.

In certain mountainous areas, they have better conditions for seed saving because they’re still growing fabulous corn. They haven’t had to deal with that much drought as in other areas. The drought-stricken areas, they are really having a hard time. Many of those regions have lost their seed completely.

When there’s drought situation, the farmers haven’t been able to harvest, and so haven’t been able to save seed. Then they have to buy seed and the seed that’s in all the seed stores is all genetically modified.

It’s the same thing in Belize and in Southern Mexico. Except for some areas of resistance like parts of Chiapas where the Zapatistas have really done a great job of running seed banks and holding their original seeds.

ARTY: So, these seed banks are basically a commercial alternative to the GMO seed sale?

CAMILA: Absolutely. These are the treasures of the community. In 2007 I went on an investigative journey to see where the optimal places to do this would be.

Some of these communities are very remote, so they don’t really communicate with even the capital of their state. We’re talking big distances, rough terrain, and very little money to travel out.

Outlying villagers come into where the market centers are. If farmers couldn’t get the seed where they live, they go to in to the market centers to buy seed. That’s where the seed stores are that have these genetically modified seeds, which they’re calling the improved seeds.

Some areas have absolutely no information whatsoever on GMOs, though, the word is starting to get out. I made a film on genetically modified organisms in Spanish and two Mayan dialects, specifically for Maya farmers and farmers of other indigenous nations who are in need of this information. That film is now traveling, giving the information about what GMOs are and how other communities are solving the problem by taking positive, sustainable measures into their own hands. This is happening, and they really need help in order to make it happen faster because of the difficulties they’re undergoing climatically. We’re really at a very crucial time for the Maya.

ARTY: If these subsistence farmers are pulled into the global economic system rather than their own community system of seed exchange, then they’re completely subjected to all the fluctuations of global grain prices.

CAMILA: As well as increases in GMO seed prices and the fertilizers and pesticides that go with them. This is a food sovereignty issue, but you have to just take one step back and realize that the Maya have been around for a really long time, and for example, in their greatest ceremonial site, Tikal in Guatemala, at its peak there were 60,000 residents there and with 10,000 visitors a day there. That’s 70,000 people a day and they were feeding them on corn. They pulled it off. I do believe that the Maya know how to handle the situation; they just need help (www.themayaseedarkproject.com). If you are so moved, please give us your support.

ARTY: I came across the Mayan phrase “I am another yourself”. What does that mean to you?

CAMILA: This is basic Maya philosophy. Maya look at people in this way. It comes from the way that they understand the universe. “I am another yourself” means what I do to you, I’m doing to myself. You understand that there’s tremendous need if you are in a village and people are starving, like they are in some places in the Yucatan and in some areas in Guatemala and Belize right now. There is an understanding that they are very close to us, they are our brothers and sisters, they are our family. The Maya look at everyone as their family- another of themselves. It’s slightly allied to the Buddhist thought of everyone at one time was your mother or father. It goes through time spans. It’s not limited by linear time. It’s vast.

This is a culture of very elevated philosophy. It’s very different from white man’s philosophy, very different than the way that we are educated in Western ways, and we have so much to learn from them. They are really right now in need of help, so I’m just responding to a mandado or mandate that my teacher from Oaxaca gave me in 1973 to return to do this particular work.

Treasure of the Sierra Foothills: Heritage Fruit and Nut Trees Discovered and Preserved

bioneers admin — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:33:25 +0000

Organic farming pioneer, Amigo Cantisano, is carrying on the work of Felix Gillet, the father of perennial agriculture in the West. The discovery of 100-year-old orchards has saved a wealth of fruit and nut genetics

ARTY: Who is Felix Gillet and why is he important?

AMIGO: Felix Gillet was an early settler of the gold country in Nevada City, California. He was a Frenchman who migrated back and forth to the United States numerous times as a sailor from northern France. He settled in Nevada City around 1859, where he opened the first barbershop. During the early 1860s, he spent a year in France making contacts and learning about the nursery trade, and then came back and used his earnings from his barbershop to purchase a piece of property and start importing plants originally from France and eventually from about 40 countries. He would bring things in that were already well known and popular to some degree in their home country, and he would test them here. The best of them he would release to farmers and gardeners.

From 1871 until his death in 1908, he ran one of the first nurseries in the West, and was extremely active at propagating, breeding and importing hundreds of varieties. From our research, he can be justly described as the father of the West Coast perennial agriculture. He brought most of the nuts, fruits, grapes, berries, etc., that are now commonly grown in the United States.

His main introductions are walnuts, almonds, chestnuts, filberts, prune plums, the European culinary plum, cherries, pears, apples, figs, strawberries, raspberries, Bing cherry, French prunes and others.

In one of his catalogs, he had 241 varieties of grapes. He brought in wine grapes, table grapes, and raisin grapes, all of which formed the industries. Felix brought in almost all the common varieties that we grow and use today. When you drink Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon or Petite Syrah or Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc, those are French varieties, or when you eat what’s now called a Thompson seedless grape or raisin, that is a French variety that came originally from Afghanistan.

Gillet kept researching and inventing and developing and hybridizing his own things, and some became very successful. So, pretty much everything that we eat in the perennial crops, except for citrus and olives, we can thank Gillet for. He did asparagus and artichokes and hops and raspberry and rhubarb, the whole nine yards.

He was really focused on edibles, but he also did a fair amount of ornamentals as well. We were working with the Rose Society and a whole bunch of the heirloom roses turned out to have come from him. He brought about 40 to 50 different varieties of heirloom roses into the United States. He was interested in pretty much anything that would grow well in the Gold Country of the Sierra foothills.

He’d also send plants to other parts of the country to see how well they grew. He provided information to USDA regularly about how these different plants grew. He is credited with starting the filbert/hazelnut industry of Oregon.

A now retired chief horticulturalist for the state of Oregon at Oregon State University came here in the ‘60s, tracing back the history of the nut industry and such in Oregon and the Northwest, and he traced the entire nut, prune, chestnut industries, walnuts, filberts, and wine grapes, all those crops right back to Nevada City, to Gillet’s nursery.

Gillet sent plants all over. We have receipts for stuff he shipped to Russia and Michigan and the Southeast and all over California and all over the Northwest. He was very active. He brought in Nonpareil almond that is still the standard of the almond business a hundred plus years later.

ARTY: In Nevada City and Grass Valley are there still trees from his nursery that are thriving?

AMIGO: All through the Sierras are the remnants of mining from the 1850s to the 1880s; miners had to eat, so they brought plants of their own to supplement stuff that they would buy.

I started picking an orchard with a group of friends in 1970. We guessed that the trees were really old, but we didn’t know, at that time, that they were planted in the 1880s and came from Felix Gillet’s nursery. They were thriving. Other than the bears attacking, they were absolutely indestructible. They were at 5,500 feet. They bloomed and survived through the frost and the freezes and snows and droughts. They weren’t irrigated at all for at least the last 75 years, and they grew great apples and pears and walnuts and prunes.

Since then I’ve been documenting these plants all over the Sierra foothills and Sacramento Valley. There are literally hundreds of sites, farms, homesteads, ranches, and town sites that still have these plants growing really thrift-fully. They are true Permaculture plants. In most cases, they get no care by human beings and they are really hardy. Weather permitting, they produce amazing crops.

We have been cataloguing these and identifying them as best we can by variety, and when possible, tracing back the history of them, because sometimes they’re on a homestead that’s got its entire history still intact. One of the places we work on is a state park that is an old mining town, and it has all its history, so we’re able to document the era of these plants. There are literally thousands of them.

As people get more aware of this, they contact us and say, “Hey, do you know about that old pear orchard down over here?” I just learned about one at another mining camp at 5,000 feet in upper Nevada County that has apples that were famous enough that in the 1890s, they were shipped to a tsar in Russia. Apples originate from the Caucus Mountains in Russia, but for some reason, hundreds of years later, these apples were coming from California.

These old orchards had to get established with water, so those are typically where there are creeks or river nearby, or where there are the remnants of mining irrigation ditches. If you follow those around, all of a sudden you find an old homestead, and here are three, five, ten or 50 trees.

ARTY: Are all the varieties identified?

AMIGO: That’s one of the challenges. There aren’t very many identification keys, there are for some of the nuts- drawings or pictures, but for a lot of the fruits it’s difficult. I’ve been working with USDA doing DNA testing, which is able to identify some, but the parent material of the DNA that the USDA has is lacking. So, they oftentimes say, “Well, it might be this or it’s got a few genes of that, but we don’t have that variety in our inventory.”

We have a whole bunch of varieties that they don’t have. They’re really interested in putting them into the germplasm station outside of Davis, as part of a preservation project.

ARTY: How did Felix Gillet breed for resilience, and why is that important?

AMIGO: Gillet was a really keen observer. Nevada City, California is almost 3,000 feet elevation, and he grew his trees in his original orchard and nursery on some very poor soil. He even bragged that if they survived on his poor soil at his difficult site, where it gets lots of snow and lots of frosts and lots of rain- typically, we get 60, 70 inches of rain in an average year sometimes more and a lot of freezes- then they’re pretty hardy. He’d bring these plants in and grow them out three, five, eight, ten years, and evaluate them and say, “Well, this plant does really good in this climate, or, no, it doesn’t do so well here, let’s send it up to Oregon and see how it does.”

Then he started taking the best of those plants with their heartiness for root rot, disease resistance, or late blooming so they miss frost, or disease resistance on the foliage or the fruit, and selecting that and crossing and breeding those until he got favorable combinations of culinary quality as well as disease or insect resistance or heartiness.

: Guigne Marbree Cherry tree and yellow rose

This took a long time. He was doing it for over 40 years. Some of these things take ten or fifteen years for traits to become apparent between the breeding and then the planting out. He created quite a few crosses that have stood the test of time. We are providing some of Gillet’s plant material to nurseries to do their own breeding with it, because it has the genetic hardiness. For example, the cherry industry is plagued by all kinds of diseases now, and the average field life of a cherry orchard is about 20 years, but we have cherry trees documented at 130 years old. They have hardiness and genes that are useful to cherry breeders.

That’s what Gillet was doing. He was doing it a hundred years ago, but we’re still in the process. We need to keep using these old genetics as a base to do the breeding for the future.

ARTY: How is your project carrying on Felix Gillet’s work?

Six years ago a few friends and I formed the Felix Gillet Institute. We have been collecting and propagating some of the best trees from Gillet’s nursery for 40 years, as well as documenting information. I now have about 800 fruit and nut trees, and about a couple of hundred grapes and figs. It’s probably close to a thousand plants we’ll have for sale next winter, if all goes well.

Gillet was a prolific writer. We’re in the process of collecting all of that to put on a website. It’s going to take a few more years to get it all collected.

: Marron Lyon chestnuts at harvest

We just keep going out finding and gathering things and adding them to the collection.

Each of our trees comes with a sort of a pedigree background describing where it came from and how the person collecting them is going to be involved in prolonging and expanding this genetic diversity.

We are working with nurseries to get some of this plant material back into the propagation role, and with the USDA and our local farm advisor on evaluating and trying to identify these plants. We also worked with our local cities. We had an ordinance passed in Nevada City that prevents anyone from cutting down a tree that apparently is a Felix Gillet tree without having been first identified and/or some propagation made off of it to extend its life if the tree needs to be cut down. We’re working on that with our county right now. We’ve been doing a lot of talks and fruit tastings.

Bit by bit we’re collecting all this data, and then we will make it available so people can see what he did and use it both for a history lesson and for an ecology/sociology lesson, as well as to grow really good foods and keep them in production. It’s like taking the idea of heirloom tomatoes and moving it into the perennial world and appreciating the benefits and traits of heirloom perennials.

I’m having fun doing it. Sometimes you meet an old timer that says, “Oh, yeah, my great grandfather planted that.” You get all this history when you go to these old sites, and get to eat and propagate the best ones.

The website’s not up yet. If people are interested, they can send me an email. thefgi@gmail.com and our phone is 530-292-3619 and our address is Felix Gillet Institute, P.O. Box 942, North San Juan, California 95960.

This has pretty much been done just out of my own pocket for the last 30 years. Anyone that has some interest in supporting us, we are a nonprofit and we can provide a tax donation receipt and also give trees to donors or give a significant discount.

A Twenty-year Vision for Organic Agriculture

bioneers admin — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:12:47 +0000

Five organic movement and industry leaders discuss their vision, the potential risks and the pathways for organic agriculture to become the dominant farming system.

What is Your Vision for Organic Food in the Next 20 Years?

Bob Scowcroft:

Responding to questions like this presumes some basic assumptions, like any one of us would have the sense of “sight” required to assess the incredible variables in human consumption, resource allocation, government decisions and corporate accountability nature will throw at us in the context of agriculture. We do know for sure that everything is connected. As I write this, four nuclear power plants are in various stages of meltdown in Japan, near genocidal wars are underway in the Ivory Coast and Libya with religious conflagrations simmering across Asia and the Middle East. Climate change is clearly impacting food production in some parts of the world (mostly noticeable by the increase of extreme weather events) leading to import/export disruptions and in a few cases food riots. The industrial world’s first response: silver bullet genetic engineering of cross species gene transplants to grow profit centers not food. Here in the United States radicals in the Republican Party have pledged to cut a significant number of critical safety nets for the poor, elderly, unwell and students. Hunger is growing by leaps and bounds.

Now do I have your attention?

It is within that context I wish to offer an organic vision of hope for the next two decades. I see organic farming and ranching as an integrated system modeling the complex web of natural systems as it takes root. All parties will come to celebrate the fertile soil that surrounds them. There will be ecological food hubs linking urban mini-farms with the surrounding countryside. Taking advantage of this indigenous system of organic production will be an educational system that inspires K-12 students to become young cooks and learn more about nutritional balance and preventive health care. New jobs will be created in food transport and processing. Trading collaborations will be established to reach outside of nearly full circle sustaining regional food sheds for national and even international organic products. If grey whales can migrate to Mexico and back within nature’s system of ecological balance, I see no reason why organic fruits and nuts can’t be exchanged for bananas and coffee elsewhere in the hemisphere. Distance traveled must be flexible and provide multiple benefits to all.

I see opportunities via the Farm Bill on the national level and activist students in our Community and State colleges on another, to rewrite our federal and state agricultural research priorities towards organic system research and education. We must reduce obscene commodity price support funding (why do we make an annual payment of nearly $150 million dollars to Brazil’s conventional cotton farmers?) with a commitment to train a new generation of young organic farmers and ranchers. We already have strong indications that integrating on-farm production systems with food justice activist’s policy objectives could provide good quality organic food to urban populations at a price which provides a fair return to growers and a nutritional return to consumers. Successful examples of these activities exist today.

The cost of energy alone should accelerate investments in all things organic. The increased demand for food stamps will create a political demand for a different way to grow and distribute food. The ever-expanding obesity crisis linked to an out-of-control health care cost system will call our attention to the abuse of certain processed foods. I think each of these constituencies will join together in common cause. The end result may well be that organically labeled food will be available through all food channels and represent over 40% market share.

Amigo Bob Cantisano: In 1982, I wrote a think piece for a magazine about where organic farming was going to be by the year 2000, an 18-year think ahead. I’m always an optimist, but I’m surprised how optimistic I was. I actually predicted that the majority of farming in the United States would be organic by the year 2000.

We’re at one percent [of farm and ranch land]; I missed it by a small fraction, but I am still an optimist, because when I started in the early ‘70s, it was 1/100^th of a percent, so we’ve had a hundred-fold increase. It takes a long time for change to happen, many, many decades. As I get older I realize that you have to be patient, optimistic and realistic.

I have always been a small-scale farmer. The largest I ever farmed was 65 acres. I currently farm about four and a half acres of mixed crops for local market. My farthest market is 15 miles away. Simultaneously, I make my living as a farming advisor with mega-farms, as well as medium and small-scale farms. My largest client farm’s over 40,000 acres of crops, 6,000 acres of which are organic.

There have been a lot of arrows thrown back and forth about scale and commitment. Most of those 40,000 acres are farmed conventionally, and they went into the organic business because it is economically intriguing and viable, but they learned that it wasn’t an easy path. They learned that you couldn’t just transition and become a successful organic farmer overnight. They took a lot of lumps, as do most of my clients.

I teach people to become organic farmers from conventional practices. Those bigger farms, by and large, have learned how to become better farmers by becoming organic farmers. I would say that, almost without exception, the clients I have are much better farmers today than they were when we started because they learned about soil ecology and crop diversity and biological diversity. They learned that you can’t just kill everything with a new pesticide, that you have to learn about how plants resist diseases and insects, and different crop rotations. They are thinking about things differently than in the past.

Where are we going with that group? If organic still continues in 20 years to be an island in the midst of a sea of disaster, which is what agriculture pretty much is, I don’t know that we’ve really accomplished a whole heck of a lot. Now, I’m really thrilled by the growth and resurgence in small-scale farms. They’re fantastic. I’m one of them. I am really thrilled by the amount of young people getting into farming. The best news I could put on the table right now is the amount of young people who want to farm organically, and most of them are fairly small-scale oriented. They’re focused on direct marketing, value-added, heirloom crops and quality. Those are really important, valuable contributions.

However, they can’t feed all Americans. We would need a wholesale revolution in the amount of people going into farming, youth or otherwise, if we are to come close to producing the food needs of America. While that great, wonderful farmers’ market and CSA group is growing, we need to get the rest of agriculture on the same path, no matter what the scale, whether they are 1,000 or 100 or one acre or 10,000 acres.

Even though I live in a fairly isolated area, everything that happens on those farms down and upwind from me affect me. Many of the organic farmers I work with happen to be constrained regularly by the fact that their neighbors are using chemicals. The air, the water, the neighboring soils are all contaminated to some degree, and sometimes to a great degree. So, I’m not afraid of the process of getting more large farms into organic agriculture.

Where will organic be in 20 years? I’m going to go out on a limb again like I did in ’82. I’m going to say in 20 years, the majority of agriculture in the United States is going to be organically farmed, that’s 51 percent. If that happens, I’ll be absolutely thrilled. I’ll be in my 80s, and I’ll be jazzed that in my lifetime half of agriculture turned the corner because once the ball starts rolling the rest are going follow.

Manufacturers, distributors, marketers and consumers drive this process. I believe that in my lifetime that consumers are going to put down their dollars where they feel strongest, and they are going to put them in things that make them feel best. There’s a huge interest in things that keep you healthy, and that spins off into environmental issues. I think that the majority of the consumers in the United States will be eating an organic diet, and if they’re eating an organic diet, the farmers will follow.

Every large-scale farm I work with is initially driven by economics, but at some point in time they get the ecological and social issues. They realize that they’ve been hoodwinked; they were led down a path by the USDA and governmental organizations and peer pressure and farm magazines that’s a dead end street. When they see the organic side of it, they realize, “Wow, this is such a better way to farm, it’s so much more complicated, it stimulates my mind; I have to be a better farmer.” The best organic farms I work with get yields oftentimes better than conventional farm yields.

One of the farmers I am working with recently pointed out to me the hawks that were circling the farm. I know that that guy was not paying attention to that ten years ago. I know that for a fact because I worked with him then. But now he’s starting to see that interaction that he has with nature. Even if he didn’t get into organic farming for its ecological, sociological benefits, eventually he gets it. What I hope happens with the rest of agriculture is we get that we’re all part of an ecological system. It’s our responsibility to do the best we can, whether we’re doing a quarter-of-an-acre or a quarter-million- acres.

Michael Ableman: It’s somewhat awkward for me to be talking about organic because we don’t actually use the label in the marketing of our products. I currently run 120-acre farm up in British Columbia, and we have a little bit different marketing scheme.

I’ve always been a major practitioner of the basic tenants of organic farming. I believe in the system. I drifted quite considerably, in fact, to the point where I had been very critical of the evolution of the movement when it, in my view, moved from movement to industry. The word movement implies some form of societal change, whether it’s social, ecological, or cultural. The industry, in its narrowest view, is often just viewed in terms of economics.

We evolved an organic system in this country. After hitting our heads against the wall for many years to get recognition for a fringe movement, we suddenly had Uncle Sam regulating us. At first it appeared to be a wonderful thing, and I think for many, as time went on, they realized it wasn’t so wonderful; it was challenging.

Initially it was very much a one-size-fits-all legislation that essentially settled smaller growers with enormous amount of paperwork and fees and inspections that were pretty hard to take, and I think a lot of folks had trouble with this.

There was also a sense that our vision of organic as a broader system had been narrowed down to a system of substitution of materials: rabbit manure for ammonium nitrate or chrysanthemum extract for malathion, but it wasn’t that simple; we wanted a more complex practice of the organic system.

We grow grain on our farm. We bought a combine this year that we share with three other people on the island. But the reality is that we will never, on the scale we’re operating, which seems large relative to where I came from, be able to even supply the needs of the island that we’re on, let alone anything beyond that.

It’s the same thing as the urban agriculture movement, which many people believe that the production of food in the cities is going to take care of the needs of those cities; it’s not. We have to develop a system that is integrated so that urban production is connected to the peri-urban and the rural production, and that they all work in some way together.

What would it take to do that? One is land. We have a very significant issue around land, access to land, especially for newer growers, who will never in their farm businesses be able to service a mortgage based on current real estate prices. It’s not going to happen. What are the alternatives of that? There are many. I personally feel that long-term leasing is a far better alternative.

Minerals are a huge issue. It’s the elephant in the room. Currently, all farming, including organic farming, is dependent upon huge holes being made in the world to supply them with the fundamental minerals to drive their system, specifically phosphorous. Where is it going to come from in the future? What I’m promoting is that every community should have its own portable rock grinder that would be moved to farms to take all that embodied mineral energy and release it.

Protein. Including the increasing numbers of younger organic growers coming on the scene, most of us have been entirely focused on fruits and vegetables for a very simple reason, it pays the bills. But the reality is we could all survive without another carrot or tomato, but we cannot survive without the engine of the diet, which is the grains, the seeds, the beans, the meat, the dairy products. My theory is that farmers in the future should not be growing fruits and vegetables ever again, that should be the job of people in their homes, in their communities, so that we’re not turning ourselves into contortions to deliver these foods like organ transplants to market. It doesn’t make sense. We should be focused on protein sources.

Number four is people. Who will do the work? It’s an enormous cultural and social crisis. We now live in a time when we have multiple generations that have been raised not to use their hands for anything but pushing keys on a keyboard. It’s very difficult to learn to do farm work later in life. I know people who have and it’s tough. Many of them do not survive it. We have to start earlier. We have to find ways to create the mechanisms in the schools and otherwise to encourage this as an honorable and well-paid profession.

And lastly is access. Most of my farming career, I have been growing food for a very narrow segment of the society, those who can afford to buy my food. Inevitably when I go and talk somebody will raise their hand and say, “We love your work, but what are you doing to feed the world’s poor and to feed growing populations?

The first thing I say is that the growing population is a population issue. No agricultural system is going to be able to provide food at the current rate of population growth in certain parts of the world. That’s a social and cultural problem.

We also have an economic problem, which is also not an agricultural problem, and which has allowed some people to have access to organic food and others not. That is a social, cultural, and economic problem, as well, it’s not an agricultural problem, and it is not the job of farmers alone to resolve those issues. It’s everybody’s job.

Those are the five areas I think that we are going to have to address if organic is going to be the mainstream in the future.

Gary Hirshberg: We look ahead 20 years and it would be amazing if, in my lifetime, we could transition to 50 percent organic agriculture, but in your parents’ lifetimes, we have switched a hundred percent. People say organic isn’t proven. It’s actually the chemicals that aren’t proven. We’ve been on this experiment with our bodies and our air and our water and our soil for about 70 years. All food, until somewhere between World War I and II, all food through humanity was organic. That means every famous person you know from history ate only organic food. Jesus Christ ate only organic food, George Washington, Mozart, Joan of Arc. It was fine for them. We think that this is a big, bold visionary new thing, but really, we just got off track.

I agree with the impediments, which are labor, land, people and nutrients. But the reason we will get there is pure economics. There was this incredible healthcare debate. Did you ever hear the word preventative once in the whole dialogue? It never even came up. The cheapest healthcare is not getting sick. If you’re treating people after they’ve been sick that leads to bankruptcy.

Forty one percent of Americans are going to get cancer. Obesity has overtaken smoking as the most costly disease, but toxins and cancer will blow right by obesity.

From a strict outflow of money, healthcare will not be able to keep up. Thirty-five years ago the number one reason that people switched to organic was their children.

Now consumer research says the number one reason to eat organic is a health event, getting sick, or having someone in your life get sick. That’s a terrible indictment of where we are, but it’s also a very interesting trend, that in its weird way will drive more people to organic.

We need to have organic everywhere. If we believe in the social, environmental and ecological underlying principles, then you have to believe that anywhere food is sold, or stuff that looks like food is sold, has to be organic. That means some pretty strange places. That means places that we wouldn’t think of, but it certainly needs to start with our schools.

The data clearly shows that genetics is six to eight percent of the explanation for the correlation for breast cancer; 92 to 94 percent is environmental factors. The vast majority of the impact is what you consumed during adolescence. So, while we can engage in preventative behaviors at an older age- higher omega 3’s, less sugar, less poisons and so forth- the reality is it’s what we feed to the very young that’s really going to drive the curve back toward organic. Organic can’t be just food for the elite, if it remains just a niche that’s fatal.

To get to 50 plus percent, let alone back to the hundred, there are a lot of concerns. There’s research dollars that we need. There’s Ag extension. We have a whole generation of Ag extension agents who’ve been growing up, trained by Monsanto and Dow. So, we have to retake our land grants. We have to retake our share of the research dollars. Industrial agriculture gets their information from the land grants. We have to retake our piece of the pie.

We also have to level the playing field in terms of subsidies. I’m not arguing for organic subsidies. I’m arguing to get rid of the subsidies for other commodities. Let’s level the playing field and give organic a fair shake. Until that time, this whole limiting factor of premium versus cheap, we’re not playing by the same rules. We’re playing against so-called cheap food that isn’t really cheap. You do pay for it somewhere.

We have to deal with the subsidy issue or none of these visions will happen. The only way that it will happen is if enormous amounts of people demand it.

Theresa Marquez: Those of us in organic are hopeless idealists and hopelessly optimistic about the future direction of agriculture. We think that the future of agriculture has to be organic.

When you start peeling back the layers of our food system to look at what’s wrong, a lot of it starts with pesticide-intensive agriculture.

The biotech industry makes the claim that GMOs are going to feed the world, and yet they are using over twice the amount of pesticides and more water than non-GMO crops.

GMO’s promise has yet to come to fruition. They promise to feed the world, but most of the products that they’re making a killing on are not even edible for human beings; they are livestock feed like soy and corn, or cotton, one of the heaviest users of pesticides. I find it unethical for the biotech industry to use the fact that people are starving to promote their own profits and their own agenda.

The food system is currently broken. Agriculture should go in the direction of a severe, critical reduction of pesticides and contaminants in the environment, especially the neurotoxins.

For me, the future is organic in the next 20 years. Unfortunately, we’re probably not going to get there without a whole lot of pain, i.e., everyone realizing they know someone who has fertility problems and can’t reproduce without assistance. That’s only 15 percent of our population now, but it’s going to be 25 percent in not too long. People think that’s normal. We should be terrified about that.

For me, we have no choice. The future has to be organic. It has to be sustainable. Will it be the kind of organic regulations we have now? I would say in 20 years, no. Those organic agricultural standards are going to continue to evolve.

Can organic achieve the same kind of yields that conventional can? Yes. Can people in regions using organic practices do a good job of feeding the people in their community? Yes, we have models and proof of this all over the world.

In 20 years, I see an evolution of our food system, if we’re still around, because the human race seems to be intent on doing itself in. We need a Noah right now to start building his ark. Slow Food has an Ark of Taste. I see that there are food arks now popping up all over.

I think that what we’re going to see is an evolution of agriculture and it must become more organic, it must be more sustainable. We must reduce our poisons in our environment, or we’re simply not going to be around.

What risks could the organic industry face that could inhibit the potential for the vision?

Theresa Marquez: How do we keep our integrity in organic is a huge question, but one that I actually feel very, very sound about what the answer is. Organic companies have to be as transparent as they possibly can about what they do. They have to have a very strong mission statement and stay true to that mission statement.

I think that part of organizational integrity is sometimes acknowledging a competitors’ contributions. It’s part of how we can round ourselves up as an organic industry, by showing that we’re all in here for the good fight. Let’s find one place where we’re all going to have an agreement, and if we’re going to duke it out in the marketplace, that’s fine, but let’s keep that separate.

We need to re-look at our social systems. We need to re-look at how we treat each other as human beings on a day-to-day basis. We need to look at our family structures.

The challenge to the organic agricultural and food movement is we don’t know how to work together. We were in a meeting the other day in which George Siemon [CEO of Organic Valley] reminded everyone that the firing squad of The Left is a circle. We’re always shooting at each other. We can’t seem to agree on the most important one or two things that we should be working on. Instead, we focus on petty differences. I can name a few petty differences that take up hours and hours of time, like should the pasture be 90 days or 120 days or 180 days? If you don’t agree on that, you have an enemy for life.

Recently, the Organic Consumers Association, very irresponsibly put out an alert that said inaccurately Monsanto was buying Organic Valley. This is a perfect example. This has cost me hundreds of hours of people’s time dealing with hundreds and hundreds of irate people.

Right now, there’s too much of a them vs. us between organic and conventional farmers. It’s unnecessary and it’s harmful. We need to build more bridges and cross them because we’re all in this together. The conventional and biotech farmers are being sold a tool chest with the idea that you can’t farm without it. I’ve actually been in a room where conventional and biotech farmers have stood up and said, “You are liars, no one could milk cows without antibiotics.”

Gary Hirshberg: The one that I’m focused on at this moment is GE alfalfa and the risk of GE contamination for organic feed. Once the genie’s out of the bottle, you can’t put it back. You can’t really control what the birds and the bees and the wind are doing, which is how seed travels.

Alfalfa is the common denominator in all dairy production. When you’re screwing around with milk in this country that causes some big problems. This is why synthetic growth hormone got slammed. Interestingly it wasn’t until Wal-Mart declared that they were not going to accept it that some of the major dairy players finally stopped using it.

Amigo Cantisano

I see a risk in that organic is pretty highly dependent on the waste products of industrial agriculture for organic farming. We use a lot of manures and composting materials that come from conventional situations, simply because there’s very limited amount of fully organic materials.

It gets composted and its toxicity is reduced, but nonetheless as long as we are reliant upon these outside sources, there will still be some on-farm pollution associated with those materials.

A lot of farms I work with utilize water district water that’s contaminated by other farmers. People test for this and fortunately they don’t seem to show up as residue problems, but it still concerns me. If society looked very closely at those issues, that might make people a little more upset.

A microbiological outbreak would be a big problem as well as the GE issue. Those could cause a loss in consumer confidence that organic food is clean.

The last one is we’re vulnerable on labor. We use a lot of labor and a lot of its not legal. We need to make it legal. Organic agriculture generally uses more labor than conventional agriculture, and most of it’s Hispanic and most of it’s illegal. We need to change that.

Michael Ableman

A serious E. coli incidence related to an organic crop where the perception is that it is the nature of the organic system that caused the problem is a serious risk.

Lack of labor is another risk. A little plug for my new homeland, the Canadians have come up with a seasonal agricultural workers’ program that is really exemplary. It involves paid flights, full health care, inspected housing, wage requirement; everything is taken care of. When people from Mexico get into the Canadian program, they literally feel like they won the lottery. Very well run. A plan like that could be adopted in the US.

Bob Scowcroft: Both intentional and unintentional consumer fraud is the most significant risk that comes immediately to mind. One more recent example is the felony indictment of the owner of a so-called organic fertilizer (containing synthetic nitrogen) company whose products were sold in California and elsewhere to organic farmers. There was a very real chance that hundreds of producers could have lost their certification. The ripple effect of unknowingly using conventional fertilizer on organically labeled products would have had a major impact on the consumer’s trust in both the non-profit verification agencies and the federal National Organic Program’s ability to catch such blatant fraud.

More attention must also be paid to the false labeling of organic products coming in from overseas. Yes, we also need to test (not necessarily for pesticide residue though an occasional check is not a bad thing too) the family farmer’s market stand organic product. If we don’t use the powers of transparency- the right to know how our food was grown and processed- built into the organic federal statute from time to time, we will only have ourselves to blame. Remember it was small family farmers who led the way to writing the 1990 Organic Foods Act, in large part due to fraudulent labeling in farmer’s markets and the small wholesale stream of organic commerce.

Frankly I also think at times we’ve been our own worst enemy. Taking advantage of our collective embrace of transparency, a small minority of organic activists continues to attack organic representatives of all sizes and perspectives for their lack of so-called purity. With little to no collaboration with other organizations these individuals have set their own bars at a level seemingly more designed to gain media attention than any real meaningful change. Bullying rarely leads to consensus.

Certainly the widespread discovery of pesticide contamination and the insidious transfer of genetically engineered genes into an organic supply chain would rattle consumer confidence. Efforts to hide such disasters would only make it worse however. We have to remain leaders in the call for the enforcement of organic standards in collaboration with consumer and environmental activists. Consumers have the right to know how their Certified Organic products are grown and processed. We have to remain vigilant that goal is not weakened.

What is it going to take to realize your 20-year organic vision?

Gary Hirshberg

Our world functions very simply. Wherever you’re buying, whether it’s at the farmers’ market or the supermarket or Wal-Mart or convenience stores, those purchases are what drive the economy. Business exists to meet our needs. I think it starts with consumer power. I think it starts with the power of one. If we ask, they’ll build it. Farmers are business people, if the demand is there, they will meet it. The thing that causes retailers to give us more space, the thing that causes media to pay attention is revenues.

Michael Ableman: I do not think there will be a structural shift in the five pieces that I articulated earlier- land, people, access to healthy food, minerals and protein- until the system is forced to change.

In Cuba, the greening of their agriculture and the phenomenal system of urban agriculture didn’t happen because it was the right thing to do. They did it because, as a nation, they had to. They were about to starve to death because their supply of seeds, equipment, fuel, fertilizers etc. stopped with the fall of the Communist Bloc.

What happened in Cuba is rather remarkable and inspiring because it points out the potential that humans have to respond and to be incredibly creative and to be incredibly resourceful under duress when they have to.

The response elevated to the highest levels of government and empowered individuals who had been studying sustainable agriculture and organic farming, and they said, “Here, now, it’s time to make it happen.” And they, as an island nation, created a no or low-input system.

For the longer-term issues, such as minerals and people and access, etc., I’m afraid that we will have to be shaken up before we get there. That’s my less-than-optimistic view.

Amigo Cantisano: If you want to create change, yank the rug out from underneath the commodity subsidies and they’ll be some change. The approximately $19 billion commodity subsidy is keeping that system in place artificially that would not be there without that support.

I live on the edge of rice country. They would not be growing rice in my neighborhood if they weren’t getting the subsidies. They would be forced to work a crop system that was more sustainable and diverse. If you want to see a quick change, yank out all the subsidies, and you put everyone on an even playing field.

Farmers are smart. They’ll figure it out. There’ll be some struggles. It’ll be like Cuba. There’ll be a shakeup, but people will figure out those systems, and those systems will turn out to be ecological systems because they’re less expensive, they’re more sustainable, and they put money in the pocket of the farmer.

Virtually no one in the specialty crop [fruits, nuts and vegetables] industries get any subsidies, and we’re doing fine. It’s the grains, predominantly, and dairy that get the biggest chunk of the money. It has created a system that allows cheap hamburger and expensive salad. It’s an ironic phenomenon.

The second thing I think has to happen is we have to have a wholesale change in the education community. Generations of training exclusively on how to do monocultures and how to use chemicals have dumbed-down the system so that the information resource that most farmers utilize is not up to date in an ecological way.

I have a job because there are no farm advisors doing this that are on the public payroll. California has a huge Ag extension service, many hundreds or thousands of Ag extension people, and yet we don’t have one organic specialist in California. I believe there is only one USDA organic specialist.

To make the change, farmers need some assistance; that will have to come from within the research and the extension community. There has to be a major shift.

Theresa Marquez:

The organic industry is woefully under-funded. What the organic industry does accomplish with no money amazes the heck out of me. The organic industry needs a promotional board like the dairy board. Organic Valley is forced to pay into a dairy board that helped develop rBGH.

A promotion board has to be established by an act of Congress, and if Congress acts it becomes a mandatory check-off. For example, in the milk industry for every 100 pounds of milk, 15 cents of that has to go to the promotion board. Given the amount of milk produced in the United States, that’s millions and millions of dollars. We lobbied to get that 15 cents back, especially when (1) they were using that money to fund the milk campaign of the Hudson Institute, which we thought was tremendously unethical and against organic; and (2) they used our funds to help develop rBGH. Almost a decade ago, the Vermont farmers staged a milk dump; they said unless their promotion board stopped funding rBGH, they weren’t going to deliver milk. So they dumped milk into the streets.

Organic Valley lobbied and said we want our money back, and the milk promotion board gave back a nickel of the 15 cents. We asked our farmers to put it into a fund that we can then use to promote organic, and 80 percent of our farmers said yes; that adds up to about $600,000. Imagine if we could get the next dime, we’d have almost $2 million. We could be funding research and energy audits and so on.

The organic industry needs its own promotion board. The challenge, which we’re working on, is to get the status of a promotion board, we have to be seen as an individual commodity like eggs, milk etc. but organic includes all commodities.

So, there’s a lack of money. Then you have lack of support from the land grants. They just forgot who they work for. They think they work for the chemical and the biotech industry. That’s where all their money’s coming from. Unless we start helping to fund the land grants, all they will be able to do is biotech and chemical research. It’s kind of a chicken and egg. We need their help and yet we have to come up with some funds to try and help fund some of the land grants, otherwise, we’ll be out of business.

Cooperation needs more development and should at least get equal time with the competitive capitalistic forces of the world. The co-op model embodies democracy. It’s very frustrating at times, and we at Organic Valley don’t always make the right decisions. Whenever we make a bad decision, George Siemon quotes Winston Churchill, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

If we don’t continue to have our farmers voices through these annual meetings, through the committees and so on, then we’re not ever going to be true to the democratic model that we set out. It’s better to make a bad business decision and keep people involved in their co-op.

Bob Scowcroft: The words that first come to mind are intentional patience. It’s going to be a long march. We need to organize a new generation of food activists at the grassroots level. They in turn will have to reach outside of traditional boundaries and build new alliances. How new? How about getting the Defense Department involved in good health eating initiatives! This work will take time. Strategic compromise will be important too. Once we can identify a solid path to change we should be able to take small steps (at times) while being prepared to move by leaps and bounds when opportunities arise.

We will need to build a system of GE free farmscapes within USA’s heartland with a goal of eliminating their use “until and when…!” (This is what some of the architects of “organic coexistence” policies had in mind when working on recent GE alfalfa regulations. Their good work was crushed by the White House.)

Our policy objectives must be rooted in local, real-world environments. Rather than farmer fly-ins to Washington, DC, we should be inviting elected officials to “welcome, come on-in’s” at our farms, school kitchens, food hub distributions systems, urban farms and food service networks. They should visit our local food banks and hospitals. They must get the picture “up close and personal”! The next generation of activists must demand organic research systems at every Land Grant University. Young farmer training programs, including clear access to capital and business plan training, modeled after a number of successful programs already in existence should be established in every eco-region and related food-shed.

We must define and begin using the social building blocks needed for a successful campaign. We can use the current “communication currency of jobs, jobs, jobs”, but that will depend upon local conditions. Enhancing rural vitality and reinvestment in infrastructure might be most important in one region whereas fair returns for family farmers combined with fair wages for workers might bring a political majority to the table in another region. Certainly clean water (both ground and streams) and an embrace of the wildlife surrounding and on our farms is critical to gaining environmental support too.

It will take significant funding, both in grants awarded and strategic investments made, from all sectors of the non-profit community and corporate marketplace. USDA organic research grants must be increased. Non-profit policy initiatives will need multi-year funding commitments to build think-tanks chock-full of academic researchers and experienced organizers working in concert with organic producers and citizen food systems advocates to accelerate change. We’ll need a creative and vibrant arts and media community working to link and educate consumers on the benefits of organic food systems as well.

Mostly, I offered a set of tools and initiatives that we will need to build on the solutions we already see working. However, we must invest some time, funds and expertise into pointing out the long-term instability of our current industrial food system model too. We have to fight every bad legislative initiative (taking pictures of farms will be illegal if a bill proposed in the Florida state legislature passes!), outrageous regulatory pronouncements (we are united in opposition to the release of GE alfalfa) and waivers on the use of banned pesticides and herbicides. We must stop the use of methyl iodide and the return of DDT!

We need to repeatedly raise the fragility of our current multi-national industrial farming system by pointing out its dependence on cheap oil, massive “on-time delivery” box stores, the use of hundreds of suspected carcinogens, and the poverty that impacts many of the workers who actually plant and harvest our food. People must be informed (through every media outlet available to us) that they are, in fact, what they eat!

The organic industry needs to establish alliances with anti-pesticide and environmental groups for common cause, and engage with environmentalists on regional and national food policies. Welcome nutrition and farm labor activists to our collective dinner tables. Raise money then raise hell. Organize the next generation and then the one after that. Celebrate family. Dance to the music. Break bread together. Bless the soil.

Sandberg’s Lean In & Cultivating Women’s Leadership

bioneers admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:46:10 +0000

By Nina Simons

As I read about Sheryl Sandberg's new book, Lean In, with recent reviews in the Nation by Katha Pollitt and in the NYT Book Review by Anne-Marie Slaughter, I appreciated how each of them decries the immediate array of attacks on Sandberg from other women, and eschews women’s tendency toward a kind of viciousness any time a new voice for women emerges.

Slaughter notes the value of Lean In acknowledging the self-doubt that is so prevalent among women, and the efficacy of encouraging women to practice overcoming it. Neither she nor Pollitt speaks to where that self-doubt comes from, though I’ll have to read the book to find out whether Sandberg does. They do note that – although she certainly comes from an extremely privileged perspective, her views encouraging women to get out of our own way and intentionally hold our own value higher are valid. Also, while she begins to address the internalized biases and fearfulness that many women carry, she only speaks minimally to the urgency of systemic changes, to provide greater access to women as leaders in the workplace through flex time and addressing some of the other structural impediments to women’s equity in the corporate world.

For me, though, her book and the ensuing reviews miss a key point that’s necessary to address whole systems change: many women don't aspire to leadership because we've inherited a definition of the word that's at the least conflicted, and often even an overt turn-off. Around the globe and in various sectors, women – and some men – are reinventing leadership, and unless and until we wrap our arms around a new, emergent definition, we'll continue to be in conflict with ourselves and slow our own progress in achieving it. Why stretch yourself to reach for a brass ring that you inwardly dislike, and that promises to make your life miserable? This was a core premise of our Moonrise book, as it is of our Cultivating Women’s Leadership trainings.

In the conventional view – the one many of us have unconsciously inherited – leadership is often based largely upon charisma and luck or achievement, and it often implies aggression, and a top-down or hierarchical approach to others. It is typically conferred through getting a position, advanced degree or receiving inherited wealth or privilege, and is often practiced solo. It implies a degree of commitment to work at the exclusion of all else that's associated with tremendous sacrifice. It is rare, in the inner story that we carry mostly unconsciously about leadership, that leaders can have a satisfying home life or family. Or a creative life, or take decent care of themselves. Is in any wonder that few women feel whole-hearted in pursuing it?

After 7 years of offering Cultivating Women's Leadership intensives, we've surfaced reinventions of leadership that are occurring all over the world, and that exemplify the kinds of flexible, invitational and team-based or rotating leadership models that women have practiced throughout time. Here are what some women have said about this retreat, and how it’s changed their approaches to leadership.

Hope you'll apply and come join us, and co-create a leadership revolution that's in service to Earth, Life and Justice for all.

Board Member Greg Watson Appointed Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture

bioneers admin — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 06:01:52 +0000


	Greg Watson

We offer our congratulations and gratitude to Board member Greg Watson upon his April appointment by Governor Deval Patrick as the Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture.

A polymath, Greg has a deep background in food and farming issues and previously held the same post from 1990-1993.

Most recently Greg was one of the key forces in realizing Cape Wind, the largest offshore wind farm project in the country. He has deep expertise in ecological design, food systems, renewable energy, and social justice. He also serves on the boards of our good friends The Buckminster Fuller Institute (he's a Bucky maven), and New Alchemy Institute, where he served as executive director of the groundbreaking biomimicry and eco-design think-and-do tank founded by our old friends John and Nancy Jack Todd.

Massachusetts is already at the forefront of reinventing local, organic and fair food systems, and Greg's leadership at the state level will no doubt help make the state a breakthrough model for the abundance of local and regional food and farming initiatives flowering across the nation and world. Go, Greg!

Donor Spotlight: Hilary and Pete Giovale

bioneers admin — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 05:58:59 +0000


	Hilary and Pete Giovale

Bioneers inspires us to give generously.

We first attended the conference in 2010. In 2011, as we prepared to attend the conference again, we braced ourselves for the experience being different (and not as spectacular) the second time. Happily, we were wrong.

We came each day thinking we would stay for this or that plenary, only to find ourselves a captive audience, glued to our seats. Walking around the conference each day was like being immersed in a “love bath” – the positive energy is palpable and contagious. We sense that we are surrounded by “our people”. It makes us very happy and recharges our batteries for the next year!

We contribute to the scholarship fund to share the conference experience with others. The quality of the conference and the community of Bioneers inspires us to give generously.

Bioneers connects people and issues in unique and critical ways.

Bioneers has been helpful in improving our understanding of the big problems – environmental, social and spiritual breakdown – that we have as a species on this planet, and how the many facets of that problem are connected. We love how Bioneers’ work expresses the interconnectedness of everything. It’s a privilege hearing from so many of the amazing people who are working on the various issues. It gives us inspiration to help create the paradigm shift that is needed now.
Bioneers’ influence is woven throughout out personal and professional lives.

Pete applies many concepts around sustainable agriculture, green business, and permaculture to our farm and green vacation rental, Jungle Bee Farm in Kauai. Hilary uses concepts she has learned about women’s leadership, art, beauty, and beloved community in her work as a bellydance instructor and director of a performance troupe. Concepts around food justice, social justice, and indigeneity influence our philanthropic work. We use our Bioneers experiences in our parenting and family life, to inspire our kids and ourselves to change the dream.

Most importantly, our involvement with Bioneers has helped us bridge the gap between ideas and action, and to realize that taking a small, brave step toward something we believe in is creating the path of healing, transformation, and reconciliation on a larger level. Bioneers is helping us push past our comfort zone and our perceived limitations and concepts of what we can and cannot do. It’s helping us to conceive of ourselves as leaders and to see that leadership comes from the heart as well as the intellect. Bioneers gives us the courage to live bravely in this world when so often everyone is trying to find the balance between hope and despair.

You can join Hilary and Pete in supporting the innovative work of Bioneers by making a donation of any amount today. To learn about the various ways you can give, please visit: http://bioneers.thankyou4caring.org/donate

Hilary Giovale is a belly dance instructor and director of a performance troupe. Pete Giovale is a green business owner and photographer. At the 2011 conference, they generously increased their support of Bioneers with a commitment of $10,000 to be given in the next four years.

Wisdom of Nature

bioneers admin — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 05:49:28 +0000


	Kenny Ausubel

Reimagining Western Civilization that respects the wisdom of Nature

Listen to Kenny's interview:

Resilient Communities Part 2

bioneers admin — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 05:46:45 +0000

Resilience. Communities. Networks. Questions. Possibilities. Hopes. Challenges.

By Scott Spann, Innate Strategies

This is the second short glimpse into what we’re up to in this domain of “resilience” – who’s focusing on it, how and why. Last time we touched on “how”, and this time we’ll look at the “why” and a little of the “how.” We’ll say a bit more about the “who” in preparation for our gathering at the pre-conference workshop – Catalyzing a Resilient Communities Network.

Why.

In our conversations with key leaders focusing on resilience, three key themes emerged that also parallel our own motivation for focusing on resilience. Both arise –out of a macro set of circumstances that virtually no one denies:

We face the clear and present danger of a system on “auto-pilot” in which the hoped-for checks and balances are amplifying our errors, rather than containing them.
In the U.S., the gridlock once only visible at the Federal level is now emerging increasingly at the State level.
Globally, no overarching body is able to step in to contain a runaway system at anything like the order of magnitude needed to safeguard those of us living on our Earth today, much less future generations.

“Why we can’t.”

Both nationally and globally, a consistent chorus of reasons why “we can’t” respond continues to block our forward progress:

Money: We can’t afford to make such changes, nor would investors back it,
Jobs: We can’t afford to displace the jobs that would be lost without “growth.”
Consumers. Consumers have made it clear they don’t want to go “green.”
Technology: We don’t know how to do this cost efficiently.
Globalism: We’re so globally interdependent that can’t act alone, only in unison.

The “How” of why we can.

We’ve discovered that the common naysayer complaints don’t hold water. In our initial interviews with15+ key leaders in the field of resilience (with more to come), we’ve sought to understand precisely how they’ve literally caused resilience in their work and communities. (For a glimpse at a few of them, go to Resilient Communities Intensive.)

Based on these leaders’ experience, there’s overwhelming evidence to show we can. Here are just a few:

Money.

Andy Lipkis with TreePeople, in his groundbreaking work around watersheds in L.A., found the funds were already present in the budgets of existing municipal departments – they just needed to be re-allocated.
Astrid Scholz with Ecotrust has introduced radically different, sustainable business models that parallel and disrupt the current unsustainable paradigm while improving equity for small business and consumers. Further, they’ve found investors very willing to take sustainable longer-term returns instead of unsustainable short-term returns.
Gar Alperovitz, a political economist with Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperative, has helped pioneer local economic development rooted in “anchor” institutional clients (e.g. hospitals, universities, local government) that, by sourcing locally with long-term contracts, drive more local jobs, investment, profits and the democratization of ownership structures and wealth.

Jobs.

David Orr of Oberlin College, via the Oberlin Project, has garnered $60MM in funding and is positioned to generate 70% of the area’s food locally and 90% of its energy renewably by 2020, while increasing the number of jobs, businesses and local investments.
Greg Watson, now Commissioner of Agriculture for the State of Massachusetts, has seen a consistent rise in the number of local farmers able to earn their living supplying food via local farmers markets.
Mary Gonzales of the Gamaliel Foundation consistently finds ways to improve both social and environmental conditions while increasing the jobs, living wage and investment prospects for local communities.

Consumers.

Paul Hawken shared his experiences in business as a clear indication that, when people are given the opportunity to purchase healthy, sustainably produced products, many will choose wisely. It’s a matter of making those options available on a level playing field.
Tom Linzey is helping local communities re-charter themselves to assert local, democratic control directly over corporations, and re-establish both their own democratic rights and give legal rights to nature. Citizen demand for such resilient alternatives is on a rapid increase, he says.
Lipkis, Scholz, Alperovitz, Orr and Watson are all finding that consumers are not the problem. Given the choice — and the needed business models and policy structures — they readily move in the direction of resilience.

Technology.

The idea that we don’t know how to do this, that it’s too complex or too expensive, similarly comes undone under examination:

Janine Benyus of the Biomimcry Institute finds the demand from industry to employ nature’s principles to solve challenging problems steadily growing. Indeed, they’re solving not just technical problems, but problems in organizational development, resource sharing, chemistry and more – 2,100+ tangible solutions so far. And, they’ve only just begun.
Scholz cites innovation in business models, information visualization and investing that help to move us closer to resilience.
Lipkis, Scholz, Alperovitz, Orr, Watson, Gonzales, Linzey are each finding abundant innovations – technical, legal, organizational, informational, economic, and on.

Globalism.

Others are demonstrating that we don’t per se have to act globally. Local action begins to catalyze regionally, then nationally, and is likely the best, and perhaps the only path to build global resilience.

Colonel Mark Puck Mykleby, in his prior role as Chief Strategic Advisor to the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, co-wrote A National Strategic Narrative advocating a move from containment to “sustainment” – from military or hierarchical control to credible influence, emphasizing the need for local, regional and national sustainability as a national security imperative.
Bill McKibben and 350.org’s work responding to local threats to climate sustainability are rooted in the conviction that we must act on the ground locally and regionally to stem the tide of climate change, if we’re to have any hope of disrupting the current model and establishing sustainable, resilient ones.
Tom Linzey’s work also focuses locally – whether with local “home rule” charters at the community level or the “rights of nature” in the Ecuadorian national constitution. The ability of local citizens to ground global issues in local, personally meaningful issues and action is critical to building the capacity to provoke change at national and then global levels.

It seems clear from the direct experience of those most engaged in the resilience movement that we have the elemental building blocks needed to make the transition – at scale – to a resilient world. Of necessity, that world will align social, environment and economic goals in ways that ensure increasing equity at each level.

What’s next?

Please join us in this exploration and conversation. We’ll be learning and communicating much more about the “who, what, how, and why” of resilience at the conference intensive and in the months to follow. We’d love for you to be a part of that dialogue and share your experience and wisdom. Please join us at Bioneers on October 18^thfor the Resilient Communities Intensive.

Mother Jones Rocks National Election Landscape

bioneers admin — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 05:45:40 +0000

Dateline smoke-filled room. Our esteemed media partner Mother Jones sent shock waves through the election landscape on September 17th with the release of a private videotape of Mitt Romney shot at a private Republican fundraiser.

Romney dismisses 47% of the electorate as “victims” and freeloaders on “entitlements” of government aid such as food, education, and housing. Talk about sucking the oxygen out of the room.

Mother Jones will be hosting a panel at Bioneers 2012 that the MJ team also designed: Mother Jones Presents: Change the World, Not the Channel: Media for Social Change.

MJ Publisher Steve Katz will moderate, and the renowned MJ Co-Editor Monika Bauerlein will present, no doubt sharing how MJ consistently generates this kind of “smart fearless journalism” that visibly produces real social change.

Also speaking will be the legendary Annie Leonard, creator of “The Story of Stuff” and most recently “The Story of Change.” Bill Ryerson, Founder and President of the Population Media Center, will share how PMC has become perhaps the leading innovator globally on using telenovellas and fictional story lines in movies and TV to convey social messages to produce real measurable social change on the ground.

This is an all-star line-up to go deep into the occult technology of how media can and does produce real change. And big props to Mother Jones for yet another investigative coup.