One Seed of Hope? Ag Land Trusts

Tumbledown just this week learned about land trusts (see Land Trust Alliance, an umbrella organization). Tumbledown's interest is agricultural land trusts, the kind that work to save groups of farms on the edges of development. Maybe Tumbledown has been asleep, or maybe just ignorant, or maybe too much oriented east of the Mississippi (most of the existing trusts seem to be a western, even Californian phenomenon), but this seems to be a way of preserving the quickly passing culture of small farm communities. An individual with the hankering to become a farmer, would be well advised to do it where a community is actively seeking to preserve the way of life--donating to preserve land from development for farming--than to tempt fate by playing the Lone Ranger.

The first ag land trust, as self reported on their web site, was the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), established in 1980. (The crest of a recent farming financial crisis in which many small farms were sold or lost.) According to the MALT web site, the trust acquires voluntary "agricultural conservation easements" on farmland, "encourages public policies that support and enhance agriculture," and has "so far permanently protected 38,000 acres of land on 57 family farms and ranches." 57 family farms and ranches sounds to Tumbledown like a small, but vital, agricultural community, the kind of community that is absolutely necessary to support the individual family entering farming for the first time, the kind of community that hardly exists anywhere any more.

A little closer to home, the American Farmland Trust and Farmland Information Center report that "more than 100,000 acres of Indiana farmland is converted to non-farm uses" every year. Tumbledown has publicly mourned this loss before. But AFT also reports that "Evelyn Parker Chambers and Mary F. Parker have donated an agricultural conservation easement on the Parker Farm, located in Sand Creek Township [Bartholomew County, Indiana], to the Sycamore Land Trust. So, even in Indiana, momentum may be building for this movement.

For Tumbledown, hope springs eternal. Perhaps even now the seed for many small farms is being planted.

Tumbledown Farm

Food Wants to be Free (like the network)

Today's NYT editorial touting the consolidation of food safety from 15 federal agencies to 1 is short sighted. It is precisely the sort of bureaucratic (and administrative, and technological) short term fix that addresses the symptom ("The single source of our food has been contaminated, so how do we stop the contaminated batch of spinach before it reaches everyone in the U.S.?") rather than targeting the real source and root cause of the problem (and the larger issue--"Why is there only one source of U.S. spinach, when spinach can be grown across the U.S.?"--i.e., the consolidation and specialization of industrial food production). A single federal agency with real POWER (in the language of the editorial, "the powers and authority it needs to control the American food supply"; emphasis mine), is a nightmare waiting to happen to small, diverse, local producers of farm food. Already, they are marginalized. Already, the only voices being heard in Washington are the voices that can pay to play. They are the large, consolidated agribusinesses. Their motive is profit and congress is all too willing to take their money and do their bidding. Tumbledown is not too happy with the way things are now, but consolidation of the bureaucracy into a single, powerful agency seems a singularly bad way to address these problems. It could lead to greater, not less, consolidation among food producers (only those large enough to comply--or to pay to write the regs--will survive). And it in no way addresses the fundamentals of the situation.

Where does the heavy hand of government regulation need to be felt today? Tumbledown thinks he knows: in the support of net neutrality. In other words, in insuring that the big boys stay out of the way of the little guy. Insuring that the little guy's voice continues to be heard and that the fees for the infrastructure are neutral, rather than advantageous to the big guy.

If food neutrality were the only aim of the one (1) proposed food safety bureaucracy, food might become both safe and free, and locally grown.

Naaah! It will never happen. But for a second, Tumbledown was living in a dream world!

Finger Prints on the Smoking Cow?

Yesterday Tumbledown learned that the FDA and State of California have now confirmed test-positive that samples of cattle feces gathered from a ranch some 2 miles from the farm where contaminated spinach was grown contains E. coli with "matching genetic fingerprints" for the same strain of E.coli O157:H7 that earlier sickened 199 people. Officials continue to caution against jumping to conclusions, but it is becoming more difficult to escape the obvious: the cow did it. With its poop print on the murder weapon, it'll be hard for the defense to make its case. The question for Tumbledown is now whether these were pasture-fed cows (doubtful) or whether they were cows of the grain-fed, manure-lagoon-producing type (more likely). It is encouraging to hear health officials admit that the growing history of "outbreaks linked to leafy greens indicates an ongoing problem," but Tumbledown is not sanguine that our state and federal officials will produce solutions that move beyond technological quick fixes. (See yesterday's post.) Not likely that nature's counterintuitive (to industrial agriculture) and permanent fix--to place more, diverse, animals (and more poop, more widely scattered) on farms that also grow a greater diversity of plants--will attract a following. After all, that would require farmers who are generalists and officials who are localists. And everyone today is a specialist and internationalist. And we like it that way. (Not T.!)

Will the Real Farmer Please Stand Up?

Tumbledown was incensed again to read Lew Middleton's comment that "Today's farmers are specialists, not generalists." (The Hoosier Farmer, Fall 2006, p. 1) When Middleton went on to claim that such specialization is "all aimed at creating the safest" and "healthiest" environment for the livestock, Tumbledown nearly let loose an expletive. Specialization is driven by corporate insatiability, by the profit motive. Specialization in livestock farming is not "friendly to the environment." It is the most likely source of the E. coli in our spinach, just ask Michael Pollan. (Op ed in today's NYT Magazine, "The Vegetable-Industrial Complex," joined a growing chorus of people who are refusing to ignore the obvious.) Pollan quotes Wendell Berry's old saw that we have taken nature's elegant solution in which "crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops" and, by becoming specialists in either crop production or animal production (but never proficient in both), we have turned nature's solution into two very real problems: "a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot."

The solution that is eventually proposed for our E. coli problem is not likely to be a real solution (that is, a radical solution, that fixes the root problem of specialization) like nature's solution, but a technological quick fix, like the "high-tech" agriculture touted in the most recent Hoosier Farmer. (The irony is, of course, that the magazine cover sported dairy cows on pasture, not beef cattle and sows in confined operations.) At any rate, Pollan is right, look for the politicos and their trough-filling K-street fat cats to start touting programs to irradiate the entire food supply. Don't look anytime soon for a return to real farms where everyone raises, "some corn, some wheat, some soybeans, a few milk cows, a few pigs, maybe some beef cows. And, of course, a big garden to help feed a growing family." (Hoosier Farmer)

Tumbledown did get a little good news this week in the story about Denise O’Brien, the organic farmer and Democratic candidate to become Iowa's secretary of agriculture. Denise is a real farmer. For Iowa's sake, and for ours, Tumbledown is praying that she wins.

Lawn Humble, Like a Bad Neighbor

Tumbledown is a bad neighbor. He does not employ the ubiquitous (in suburban Indiana) orange-green-white trucks from LawnPride to apply their tank full of "treatments" to his lawn. He does not ask whether the products are "safe" for his rabbits to eat or his children to play on. He sees the man in the truck don elbow-length (green!) latex gloves to handle the stuff. He knows that it is designed to keep his home free of ants (kill them dead), and spiders, and other "pests." (Oh, my!) He knows the chemicals kill the worms and the grubs. And he does not have to ask what happens to the nitrogen from the excess fertilizer when it rains. He sees the street drains, and knows they run to the White River, and on into the Ohio, and the Mississippi, and down into the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone."

How does Tumbledown keep his lawn green? He welcomes the jumble of life. (But he squashes spiders that make their way inside.) He lets the larger eight-legged ones go free to spin their webs under the eaves. He enjoys the chirp of the crickets in early October, and the mantis as she makes lunch of the other pests.

What is the result of not spraying weed killer or chemical fertilizer? The result is dandy-lion greens and jelly in the spring. White clover (and fixed nitrogen, nature's fertilizer!) run amok with white flowers in mid-summer. And bugs everywhere. Tumbledown's aeration comes from plants (a.k.a., weeds) with deep roots. They break up the deadpan clay that the construction company left (hardly soil at all, more like concrete), making paths for air and water to get to the roots of the grass. And the grass? It grows tall and lush without watering, even through the longest, hottest part of our mild Indiana summers.

Tumbledown's lawn is such a tragedy. (No, really!)

Problem is, Tumbledown will not be molified by corporate promises that the poisons are "approved for use on residential turf and landscapes." Approved? By whom? Rather than say "O.K." and "that must make it right and safe," Tumbledown asks why the government has the right to "approve" the spread of poison on every lawn in suburbia?

If that is LawnPride (tm), Tumbledown is glad to remain LawnHumble. If that makes him a bad neighbor, so be it.