Mexico's plight and hope from a mad farmer

Greetings everyone,
It’s been quite some time since my last post, and by now you will have surmised that the Farm Dispatch is transitioning from a weekly to a “whenever time and inspiration permit” format. My excitement for sharing what I'm learning hasn't diminished, but my free time and potential writing topics have. And of course there is the phenomenon of "the more you know, the more you realize you don't know" that I run into with increasing frequency! Anyway, I hope you'll continue to get something out of these posts even if they're fewer and further between.

This Saturday (October 6), the farm will be having its annual fall harvest festival from 11 - 5. If you're interested in coming, here is the press release from UCSC (http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/text.asp?pid=1564). I hope to see some of you there.

To start off with this week, I would like to thank everyone who attended the “Day at the Farm” event on September 8. It was wonderful to see so many friends and family engaging with one another and enjoying the beauty of the farm. For those of you who weren’t able to make it, I’ve included a link to some photos taken from our good family friend Toddy Kuiper (http://picasaweb.google.com/morse.chad/ADayAtTheFarmSept82007). There were approximately 50 people in attendance, ranging in age from four months to 820 months (give or take!). Given the positive feedback I’ve gotten from some of you, I am hoping to organize a similar event sometime next year. Which brings me to the good news that myself and six others have been hired on as assistant garden managers for the upcoming year. So an open invitation to visit stands until November of 2008!

At the outset of the September 8 event, I gave a short talk on two fundamentally different ways in which we can approach agriculture, one of which I termed “industrial” and the other “ecological” (if you’d like to hear an audio file of the talk, Tim Andonian was kind enough to put a copy of it on his web site http://64.81.54.85/nexus/node/12). To grossly oversimplify, the former approach superimposes industrial techniques and values on the processes of cultivation, marketing, and consuming food. By contrast, the ecological approach to food systems envisions human beings as one organism in an incredibly complex but well-balanced set of relationships. The goal of industrial agriculture is to attain maximum yield and profits, whereas the goal of ecological agriculture is to maintain balance. To address our pressing environmental and social challenges, I suggested, we must begin to shift our collective thinking from and industrial model to an ecological one.

As part of the apprenticeship program, we attend classes on many ag-related topics and visit innovative farms in the Bay Area. A recent lecture by environmental science professor Ann Lopez and a visit to grower Bob Cannard’s farm in Sonoma County illustrate vividly the implications of industrial and ecological approaches to agriculture.

Ann Lopez has been researching the impact of our increasingly industrialized food system on farming communities in Mexico, particularly after the ratification of NAFTA in 1994. For several reasons, including an inability to compete with heavily subsidized corn grown in the US, Mexican farmers have had to leave their land by the hundreds of thousands. Many come to find work in the US and send money home to their families in Mexico. Others move to find factory work in Mexico’s rapidly expanding urban areas. Still others try to find work on the large-scale industrial farms which are proliferating as small farmers leave their land. The environmental and social implications of this phenomenon are huge. Whole communities are losing their male populations to the US or to the cities. Land that has been farmed with place-specific, sustainable techniques for hundreds or thousands of years is being converted to huge industrial farms. The biodiversity of hundreds of varieties of corn and other crops that have been selected for over the millennia are being lost and replaced by a handful of genetically modified hybrids produced by transnational corporations. Toxic pesticides and herbicides (many of which have long been banned for use, but not production and sale to other countries, in the US) are being used in staggering amounts. HIV/AIDS has reached epidemic levels in some areas, carried home to Mexico from the US by men who live virtually isolated from all women save prostitutes for many months out of the year. While it can be difficult to perceive these symptoms in wealthier nations, the logic of industrial agriculture leads inexorably to ecological and social collapse, the effects of which are always felt first in developing nations.

Happily, this very sobering lecture was followed a few days later by a visit to the most complete and exciting example of an ecologically oriented farm that I’ve ever seen. On a crisp fall morning, Bob Cannard showed us around his 30 acre home farm a few miles outside of the city of Sonoma. At first glance, it’s hard to imagine that Bob’s farm produces fruits, vegetables, meat, and poultry for notable clients including Chez Panisse (Alice Waters’ renowned Berkeley restaurant that helped launch the movement back towards fresh, local food). In fact, one’s first impression is that Bob doesn’t know much about farming at all. He brings us to a ¼ acre field of what he maintains are potatoes, but all that is visible is a fantastic number of waist-high weeds. Yet there is method to this madness. The weeds serve to stabilize the soil against erosion and, when they have finished their life cycle, their biomass provides excellent fertility. Bob only cuts the weeds back at very specific stages of the potatoes’ life cycle to allow his crop a bit of competitive advantage. Most of Bob’s techniques fly in the face of what the majority of us would consider good farming practices, and yet he is able to grow extremely high quality produce with few inputs and little mechanization. The key to Bob’s system is his extraordinary understanding of biological and ecological systems. Through this depth of understanding, he is able to work with natural systems and not against them. And because he so successfully cultivates a balanced ecosystem, he has virtually no problem with insect or animal pests.

Aside from the obvious disparity in environmental health, equally important is the difference in quality of life that these approaches afford those who work the land and provide us with our sustenance. The Mexican farmers who have left their homes and families to work in Salinas or Watsonville or Yuma are now engaged repetitive, back-breaking work that demands much from their bodies but little from their minds. Bob Cannard radiates a passionate joy as he uses all of his intelligence, creativity, and powers of observation to orchestrate farming that has been elevated to the level of art.