Many greetings and a happy 2008 to you all. Life is quiet but still quite busy at the farm and gardens. The cover crop has reached knee high, a hardy few food crops tough out the January cold, and we turn our attention to pruning the 500 or so fruit trees that populate this place. There are just seven of us here in this six month interim before the apprenticeship program begins anew in April. Counting feline friends, we are 11.
This post is primarily an early heads up for another "Day at the Farm" event that I'm planning to host in mid May or June. This time around, we'll be gathering in the three acre Alan Chadwick garden on the north side of campus where I will be working until November of this year. The Chadwick garden is home to steep slopes, beautiful vegetation, and over 100 varieties of apple trees. I'll keep you updated as to date, time, and workshops as the calendar sorts itself out.
I also thought I'd share a statement that our local congressman, Sam Farr, made in the House of Representatives last fall in honor of the farm's 40th year. Congressman Farr's remarks are a reminder that, little by little, a new appreciation of food safety and sustainability is taking root in our national consciousness and in our government.
Congressional Record of the 110th Congress: In Honor of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, October 4, 2007
House of Representatives
The Honorable Sam Farr
of California
"Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor one of the most prominent centers of agricultural research and education in the world on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. The Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS), located on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz, enjoys a reputation as the Harvard of organic farming.
While this reputation is well deserved, it did not come easily to the UCSC Farm, as CASFS is more commonly known. The program began life in 1967 as an obscure 4-acre organic garden tucked away in a disused and unnoticed corner of the UCSC campus. It was birthed by master gardener Alan Chadwick, who inspired a group of students to convert a dry hillside into a magnificent terraced garden that incorporated the latest techniques in chemical-free horticulture and reflected the back-to-the-land Zeitgeist of the day. In 1972, the project expanded onto another unused campus site where garden participants began a 17-acre, later 25-acre, experimental organic farm. There they set out to explore ways of improving and applying organic farming techniques. Throughout the 1970s, the little UCSC Farm community quietly grew, with a mixture of a little campus support, some creative grant writing, and the sales of its farm produce. A steady stream of student apprentices advanced through the constantly evolving program. By the 1980s, the UCSC Farm had come to a crossroads. Could it reach beyond the little world of the UCSC campus and help shape the broader world of agriculture?
While the UCSC campus family welcomed the project, the broader UC system didn't know what to do with it. It didn't have any formal accredidation and it was not located on one of the UC land grant institutes where agriculture was supposed to happen. It simply lacked the necessary pedigree to secure an official and funded place within the University of California system. As the State Assemblymember representing the Monterey Bay Area during the 1980s, I had the honor of securing a line for the UCSC Farm in the State's higher education budget. In 1990, I authored the California Organic Standards Act, which was largely shaped by the work at the UCSC Farm and the Santa Cruz community of organic growers that had grown up in its neighborhood.
Since entering Congress, I have worked hard to share the story of the UCSC Farm's important work with my colleagues. Congress has responded with a total of over $3 million in direct appropriations to the UCSC Farm since 2000 to assist with its important research and extension work with the rapidly expanding organic farming sector. Indeed, the UCSC Farm's influence has been far-reaching, inspiring many sustainable agricultural programs at other universities, including UC Riverside, Cal Poly, and USDA's Agricultural Research Service.
Madam Speaker, it is with great pleasure that I pass on the congratulations of the House to all the people who have worked so hard over the course of the past 40 years to make the UCSC Farm such a great success."
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Sunday, September 30, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
sustainability and diversity
Greetings all. Apologies for my recent hiatus. As we push further into summer at the farm, a sort of biological crescendo is building. More crops. More harvests. More weeds. More weeding. This past weekend also marked the program’s 40th anniversary, so the farm has been playing host to over 500 alumni for a series of events and symposia.
Before I launch into this week’s topic, I wanted to clarify some info with regards to the “Day on the Farm” event on September 8. I realized that my invitation didn’t make it obvious that this is something that I personally am organizing for friends and family, not an event that is being planned by staff of the agroecology apprenticeship program. Thus you can expect a more amateurish, but hopefully more personal, educational experience! Again, if you haven’t signed up but would like to go, please RSVP by email or by evite.
My writing thus far has generally taken the UCSC farm as its starting point for subject material, but today I’d like to jump a few time zones and a very big ocean for a field trip to Asia. In 2005 and 2006, I visited small agricultural villages in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, respectively. While Madumana in southern Sri Lanka and Toho on the island of Borneo are worlds apart in many respects, they share some common traits which relate to my topic this week: the importance of cultural and agricultural diversity with regards to sustainability. Madumana and Toho are both small villages with several hundred residents. Life in both villages centers around agriculture, the staple crop in each locale being rice. While modern technologies are slowly creeping in, villagers in Madumana and Toho live much like their ancestors 100 or 500 years ago likely did. Monetarily, the villages are very poor. There are few if any paved roads, cars, or mechanized farming tools. Villagers face public health issues that are largely non-existent in industrialized areas. And anyone craving a caramel macchiato is out of luck, as Starbucks has not yet set up shop in either village.
Yet I have found much to be inspired by in Madumana and Toho. There is neither obesity nor malnutrition. No traffic jams. Low crime. There is a strong sense of community and a connection to and appreciation of the land. There is a general sense of well-being and personal integrity that is eye-opening. And, most importantly for the subject matter of this blog, both villages are still relatively self-sustaining with regards to natural resources.
I don’t intend to romanticize the lives of villagers in Madumana and Toho. Rather, I want to share how striking and affirming it is to see people living meaningful, comfortable lives without cars and televisions and supermarkets (and thus without consuming the resources these modern conveniences necessitate). It is invigorating to meet people who know where their food comes from and how to grow it. People who build their own houses and create their own music. And yet, it is almost universally assumed that the logical progression for Toho and Madumana is to “develop” and to join the rapidly globalizing world. It is not difficult for me to imagine how that will affect the villages and the villagers. Farmers will shift from subsistence farming intended to feed their families and their livestock to cash cropping. Young people will flood into cities that are growing too quickly to absorb the influx as farm work becomes more mechanized. Modern conveniences and technologies will stream in, followed closely by modern problems and pathologies. Local customs, cultural traditions, languages and dialects will recede as villagers discover the addictive qualities of General Hospital and Survivor.
There are of course positives that are brought forth by this process, such as improved access to health care education. But my focus today is on what is often lost in the process we call globalization: diversity.
Several years ago, I wrote a research paper on linguistic diversity in the European Union. The EU, like the rest of the world, is seeing its linguistic diversity plummet. There are many reasons for this; mass media, advances in travel and communications, etc. But what it boils down to is that as scale increases (in terms of governance, business, etc.), diversity becomes increasingly costly and cumbersome. Over half of the EU’s annual budget, for example, goes towards translation, interpretation, and printing to accommodate the union’s 11 official languages (This was as of 2000. After new expansions, the number of official languages and associated costs have likely increased). Yet there are still native speakers of over 30 major languages in Europe that cannot read the rules that govern them in their own tongue. From there it is a slippery slope towards linguistic irrelevence and eventual extinction. The EU is struggling to strike a balance between the efficiency of communication and the richness and diversity of human expression.
With regards to the global market and sustainability, we are witnessing a similar, and very serious, tension of extremes. Markets expand as those participating in them homogenize their practices and preferences (this is the aim of the IMF and WTO’s “structural adjustment”). Natural systems, on the other hand, have always flourished through diversity. Markets favor short-term gain, whereas natural systems lend themselves to long-term sustainability. My concern is that we are dangerously out of balance in this respect. The logic of the market has become so dominant that it is threatening to pave over, in a blink of geological time, the biological, cultural, and agricultural diversity that have been developed by both man and the natural world through the millennia. My regard for Madumana and Toho is not merely sentimental. They are not Utopias, but they offer us lessons in how to live more lightly and perhaps more sanely. But they are lessons we must learn quickly, because such villages are disappearing into our increasingly homogenized global economic system at an alarming rate. Sustainability is place specific. There is no “one size fits all”. Thus we should not be looking for models to emulate, but for principles that can be applied anywhere. In terms of sustainable living, the world is busily burning down its libraries of Alexandria and plunging itself into ignorance. We need to treasure and revere the volumes which still exist.
The thoughts I've shared on this topic are greatly simplified and perhaps provocative, so I would love to hear your questions or comments. Until next time, be well!
Before I launch into this week’s topic, I wanted to clarify some info with regards to the “Day on the Farm” event on September 8. I realized that my invitation didn’t make it obvious that this is something that I personally am organizing for friends and family, not an event that is being planned by staff of the agroecology apprenticeship program. Thus you can expect a more amateurish, but hopefully more personal, educational experience! Again, if you haven’t signed up but would like to go, please RSVP by email or by evite.
My writing thus far has generally taken the UCSC farm as its starting point for subject material, but today I’d like to jump a few time zones and a very big ocean for a field trip to Asia. In 2005 and 2006, I visited small agricultural villages in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, respectively. While Madumana in southern Sri Lanka and Toho on the island of Borneo are worlds apart in many respects, they share some common traits which relate to my topic this week: the importance of cultural and agricultural diversity with regards to sustainability. Madumana and Toho are both small villages with several hundred residents. Life in both villages centers around agriculture, the staple crop in each locale being rice. While modern technologies are slowly creeping in, villagers in Madumana and Toho live much like their ancestors 100 or 500 years ago likely did. Monetarily, the villages are very poor. There are few if any paved roads, cars, or mechanized farming tools. Villagers face public health issues that are largely non-existent in industrialized areas. And anyone craving a caramel macchiato is out of luck, as Starbucks has not yet set up shop in either village.
Yet I have found much to be inspired by in Madumana and Toho. There is neither obesity nor malnutrition. No traffic jams. Low crime. There is a strong sense of community and a connection to and appreciation of the land. There is a general sense of well-being and personal integrity that is eye-opening. And, most importantly for the subject matter of this blog, both villages are still relatively self-sustaining with regards to natural resources.
I don’t intend to romanticize the lives of villagers in Madumana and Toho. Rather, I want to share how striking and affirming it is to see people living meaningful, comfortable lives without cars and televisions and supermarkets (and thus without consuming the resources these modern conveniences necessitate). It is invigorating to meet people who know where their food comes from and how to grow it. People who build their own houses and create their own music. And yet, it is almost universally assumed that the logical progression for Toho and Madumana is to “develop” and to join the rapidly globalizing world. It is not difficult for me to imagine how that will affect the villages and the villagers. Farmers will shift from subsistence farming intended to feed their families and their livestock to cash cropping. Young people will flood into cities that are growing too quickly to absorb the influx as farm work becomes more mechanized. Modern conveniences and technologies will stream in, followed closely by modern problems and pathologies. Local customs, cultural traditions, languages and dialects will recede as villagers discover the addictive qualities of General Hospital and Survivor.
There are of course positives that are brought forth by this process, such as improved access to health care education. But my focus today is on what is often lost in the process we call globalization: diversity.
Several years ago, I wrote a research paper on linguistic diversity in the European Union. The EU, like the rest of the world, is seeing its linguistic diversity plummet. There are many reasons for this; mass media, advances in travel and communications, etc. But what it boils down to is that as scale increases (in terms of governance, business, etc.), diversity becomes increasingly costly and cumbersome. Over half of the EU’s annual budget, for example, goes towards translation, interpretation, and printing to accommodate the union’s 11 official languages (This was as of 2000. After new expansions, the number of official languages and associated costs have likely increased). Yet there are still native speakers of over 30 major languages in Europe that cannot read the rules that govern them in their own tongue. From there it is a slippery slope towards linguistic irrelevence and eventual extinction. The EU is struggling to strike a balance between the efficiency of communication and the richness and diversity of human expression.
With regards to the global market and sustainability, we are witnessing a similar, and very serious, tension of extremes. Markets expand as those participating in them homogenize their practices and preferences (this is the aim of the IMF and WTO’s “structural adjustment”). Natural systems, on the other hand, have always flourished through diversity. Markets favor short-term gain, whereas natural systems lend themselves to long-term sustainability. My concern is that we are dangerously out of balance in this respect. The logic of the market has become so dominant that it is threatening to pave over, in a blink of geological time, the biological, cultural, and agricultural diversity that have been developed by both man and the natural world through the millennia. My regard for Madumana and Toho is not merely sentimental. They are not Utopias, but they offer us lessons in how to live more lightly and perhaps more sanely. But they are lessons we must learn quickly, because such villages are disappearing into our increasingly homogenized global economic system at an alarming rate. Sustainability is place specific. There is no “one size fits all”. Thus we should not be looking for models to emulate, but for principles that can be applied anywhere. In terms of sustainable living, the world is busily burning down its libraries of Alexandria and plunging itself into ignorance. We need to treasure and revere the volumes which still exist.
The thoughts I've shared on this topic are greatly simplified and perhaps provocative, so I would love to hear your questions or comments. Until next time, be well!
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
A day at the farm: September 8
Greetings all,
I'd like to invite you to roll up your sleeves for a day of workshops, good food, and good people at the UCSC Farm and Garden. I'll be giving a short class on agroecology followed by a potluck lunch, skill workshops, and farm tours. Family and friends, friends of friends, friends of family, family of friends... all are welcome! I suspect that many of you won't be able to make it due to minor logistical challenges (i.e. you don't live in this hemisphere). Your presence will be missed!
The tentative schedule for the day is as follows:
9:45am: Arrive at the farm
10:00am: Interactive class on agroecology and food systems
12:00pm: Potluck lunch
1:00pm: Skill workshops
2:30pm: Farm tour
Everyone is invited to attend all or selected events. As the date approaches, I will send more detailed information as to workshops, class content, parking, etc. If possible, please RSVP by August 20. If you know what you would like to bring for the potluck, include it in your response on the evite so that others can plan accordingly. There will also be some dishes with food fresh from the fields. If you did not receive an evite but would like to attend the event, please email me at morse.chad@gmail.com.
I look forward to seeing many of you and sharing with you this very inspiring place!
All the best,
Chad
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Cultivating reverence
I'm afraid I may be jumping the bounds of agriculture and straying into social commentary more than usual this week, but the topic of this post has been on my mind lately. I'd like to share a few thoughts on our society's relationship both to food and to death and dying, and why those relationships are at the heart of many of our environmental, social, and psychological problems. The complexities and specialization of the modern world, I believe, have distanced us from the processes that bring food to the table and that bring our lives to a close. While modernity has brought us inarguable benefits, our decreased intimacy with and therefor understanding of the most basic processes of life and death has serious ramifications.
These thoughts were rekindled last week during a conversation with a dinner guest at the farm who is studying to be a palliative care nurse. I shared with him that my father passed away two years ago and spent the last two weeks of his life under hospice care--first at his own home and finally at Monterey Hospice House. While hospice care didn't make the loss of my father any less painful, I believe it helped my family integrate his passing with the broader scope of his life. That sense of integration has brought me some understanding, comfort, and sense of peace. So often, the aging and dying process is hidden behind the doors of nursing homes and hospitals. I think we all suffer on account of this--those isolated by their age or illness and those of us who have become unfamiliar with death and dying. Consequently, we understand very little about death. We fear it and avoid facing it all the more. The fascination with death and violence in our popular media reflects a deep alienation from the dying process.
Our relationship to food has become similarly detached and opaque. Because we only participate in the final stage of the process--consumption--food has been reduced to a commodity. Most of the process which brings food to our supermarkets is now hidden from view. Yet for millennia, agriculture was a primary way in which mankind studied, understood, and appreciated the workings and rhythms of the natural world. This intimacy with natural and semi-natural ecosystems fosters a reverence for life which manifests logically in an attitude of respect, conservation, and stewardship. Now that less than 2% of of Americans are directly engaged in agriculture, and those who do farm are increasingly pressured to do so in a way that is more industrial than ecological, it is not surprising that we face an ecological crisis. Alienation from the natural world is a much bigger threat to the environment than an army of Humvees because the latter stems from the former.
The 20th century thinker Krishnamurti wrote, "Our problems--social, political, religious--are so complex that we can solve them only by being simple, not by becoming extraordinarily erudite or clever." Gardening is in some ways a simple act. But it is helping me cultivate a deeper understanding of and reverence for life, death, and the processes of the natural world. And because actions are ultimately extensions of our attitudes, I find such cultivation to be a most practical step in addressing in my own way the complex problems of our time.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Community Supported Agriculture
Tuesday morning was cool and foggy--par for the course in Santa Cruz and excellent weather for our first big harvest.
We convened in the fields and gardens to receive our marching orders. The chalk boards listed about 20 crops and the amount to be harvested of each. 200 heads of lettuce. 80 pounds of spinach. 200 pints of blueberries. When all had been cut and cleaned, boxed and bundled and packaged, we moved the produce to the picturesque old barn where the farm's Community Supported Agriculture members pick up their weekly bounty.
Small farmers are faced with the challenge of selling their produce in a food system that favors large, industrial growers. Hundreds of thousands of small farms have succomed to this economic calculus in the past century. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is one of the more compelling models that has evolved to meet this challenge. Members of a CSA purchase a share of the farmers produce in advance of the harvest season and receive a regular supply (typically weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly) of fruits and vegetables. The farmer benefits by receiving his capital up front and is assured a steady market throughout the season. Some of the financial risk of his operation is effectively dispersed through the "investers" in his enterprise. Members obtain high quality produce at a reduced rate and enjoy a sense of connectivity to the food they eat, the land it was grown in, and the farmer whose labor brought it to being.
The CSA evolved independently and uniquely in Japan and Europe after World War II. The first CSA in the US, largely based on the European model, began in 1986 in New Hampshire. Today there are upwards of 2000 CSA farms in the US, ranging in membership from 10 - 1000. Farmers and members have developed countless varieties on the CSA theme. Some CSA memberships entail some involvement in farm labor, while other CSA members simply receive their reqular box without much interaction with the farm.
CSAs present their share of challenges as well. Developing a membership base, managing a large cooperative, creating newsletters, etc. are additional and often time consuming responsibilities that are added to the farmer's plate. Furthermore, CSAs typically offer a wide variety of seasonal produce to attract members and thus present farmers with more complexities than a monocrop operation.
Many of our 100-plus CSA members arrived early on Tuesday, often with their children, eager to pick up their first share and make bouquets out of our CSA flower garden. Their boxes included a dozen or so crops, including spinach, strawberries, rainbow chard, and -- to everyone's great delight -- two pints of fresh blueberries.
Monday, June 4, 2007
laboring for strawberries
On Saturday, I drove 10 miles north of Santa Cruz on Highway 1 to Swanton Berry farm. Swanton's farm manager, a former program participant, had said they could use a few extra hands for their peak strawberry harvest. So, four of us ventured up the coast for a square meal, $8/per hour, and an education in the daily reality of manual field labor.
We hit the fields at 10:30am and maneuvered our harvesting carts down the rows until 4pm with a half-hour lunch break. By 12:30pm, with knees and back beginning to express their displeasure, I had established what I thought to be a respectable pace of one flat (12 one pint baskets) per hour. Then the crew arrived. 30 men -- mainly Mexicans and a handful of Salvadorians -- marched onto the field and swept like a wave down the rows. In one hour's time, they had picked the adjecent field clean at a rate of 4 1/2 flats per person per hour. Then they were gone and on to the next field.
Swanton is one of California's oldest organic berry farms. Relative to most farms, they provide their workers with very good compensation: health care, housing, $8-10/hr wages, and overtime pay (after 60 hours). Yet there is no getting around the fact that this is back-breaking work. During picking season, workers spend 60-80 hours per week in the fields. In the winter months, many relocate to the fields in Yuma, Arizona. Job security is very low, and workers spend months and sometimes years away from family.
Cheap labor is the backbone of California agriculture and has deep historical roots. Our present system can essentially be traced to the Spanish period, during which time indigenous peoples were forced to cultivate mission lands. After the precipitous decline in the native population, a long line of impoverished immigrant groups have renewed the labor pool: Chinese, Japanese, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, Okies, Filipinos, and a second wave of Mexicans (and other Central Americans). This historical background explains in part why California agriculture remains so labor intensive when compared to farming practices in regions like the Midwest, where labor has increasingly been replaced by technology.
In a previous post, I suggested that food should occupy a higher place on our collective priority list and should, by extension, cost more. Just as there are hidden environmental costs in the pursuit of cheaper and cheaper food, there are manifold hidden social costs.
We hit the fields at 10:30am and maneuvered our harvesting carts down the rows until 4pm with a half-hour lunch break. By 12:30pm, with knees and back beginning to express their displeasure, I had established what I thought to be a respectable pace of one flat (12 one pint baskets) per hour. Then the crew arrived. 30 men -- mainly Mexicans and a handful of Salvadorians -- marched onto the field and swept like a wave down the rows. In one hour's time, they had picked the adjecent field clean at a rate of 4 1/2 flats per person per hour. Then they were gone and on to the next field.
Swanton is one of California's oldest organic berry farms. Relative to most farms, they provide their workers with very good compensation: health care, housing, $8-10/hr wages, and overtime pay (after 60 hours). Yet there is no getting around the fact that this is back-breaking work. During picking season, workers spend 60-80 hours per week in the fields. In the winter months, many relocate to the fields in Yuma, Arizona. Job security is very low, and workers spend months and sometimes years away from family.
Cheap labor is the backbone of California agriculture and has deep historical roots. Our present system can essentially be traced to the Spanish period, during which time indigenous peoples were forced to cultivate mission lands. After the precipitous decline in the native population, a long line of impoverished immigrant groups have renewed the labor pool: Chinese, Japanese, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, Okies, Filipinos, and a second wave of Mexicans (and other Central Americans). This historical background explains in part why California agriculture remains so labor intensive when compared to farming practices in regions like the Midwest, where labor has increasingly been replaced by technology.
In a previous post, I suggested that food should occupy a higher place on our collective priority list and should, by extension, cost more. Just as there are hidden environmental costs in the pursuit of cheaper and cheaper food, there are manifold hidden social costs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)