Sustainable Agriculture

“Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world.”
-Michael Pollan “The Omnivores Dilema

I had some time to kill. Waiting for a friend. I went into the nearby CVS hoping to find a magazine that discusses our current “Green” revolution. If only it really were. I quickly found a popular science magazine with a cover featuring “The Future of the Environment.” It covers some wonderful futuristic ideas for sustainability. The current reality though is that companies are buying Carbon credits for trees that have not yet been planted so they can evade the taxes meant to preserve our ecosystem. The FDA has turned the once powerful idea of Organic Certification into a very profitable marketing tool that provides little to no protection for our ecosystem.

The calories we are consuming require more and more calories for their production and therefore a bigger and bigger negative impact on the environment. I had the opportunity recently to travel to Northern California with the Culinary Institute of America. Our trip was part of the California Food & Wine Seminar in the interim of the seventh and eighth semesters of the Bachelors program. Each student chose their own focus for a four page research paper to be part of a larger four person group project. My focus is on the differences between Organic and Sustainable. There is currently no Sustainable Certification recognized by the USDA. The "Organic" certification is designed to favor the commercial farm instead of the original virtues behind the organic movement.
Take for example somewhere like Earthbound Organics. “Organic lettuce.” Twenty thousand acres of machine fed, pruned and harvested lettuce. Their size alone forces them to spray with layers of “Organic” pesticides. Mono-cropping such as this removes specific nutrients faster from the earth. Oil by-products are then required to “fix” the soil. After using copious amounts of fossil fuel power instead of man power they can sell their product down a long chain and across long distances only to undersell the guy who grew his sustainably down the street from where it is being sold. The simple fact that a field can be injected with fertilizers to make products grow does not mean the land is being sustained.
Produce grown with synthetic fertilizers is less nutritious than if grown with composted soil. I almost wanted to say natural soil there, but the term natural has become dishonest as there is no regulation guiding the use of the term. Today you can buy all sorts of “All Natural” products but the term is only a marketing tool. Science has proven that these products are not nearly as healthy as they claim to be. The laws of false advertising do not seem to apply to the food we eat. Is not our health and survival the primary concern in life? With the frantic pace of the world economy, many age-old values are being lost. As Wendell Berry says in his essay “The Idea of A Local Economy:”
A total economy is one in which everything—“life forms,” for instance,—or the “right to pollute” is “private property” and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes—and especially democratic processes—are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale. And when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people’s products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations: communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to “grow” by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world…

This may seem like a pessimistic view but it is all too true in the modern market. This battle has been fought for decades and will probably continue for many more.
The organic revolution began back in the nineteen forties with Organic Gardening and Farming magazine. Its goal was to move away from the idea that plants only require NPK (Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium) and instead require the full spectrum of life death and decay that is the composting process. On April 20, 1969 a group known as the Robin Hood Commission took over a plot of land belonging to the University of California. Their goal was to create a model organic agrarian system. They would be raising a truly sustainable system and distributing its produce to the poor. It was this type of awareness that empowered the organic revolution. Much more than just a standardized set of fertilizers it represented an attunement with the essential needs of society.
When the organic standards list was released in 1997, the list of acceptable products included genetically modified crops as well as irradiation and sewage sludge. Today the list has been revised to allow such synthetic additives as ascorbic acid and xanthan gum. Bleach and ethanol are both on the list or permissible products as well. Many regulations for the treatment of animals for food have been set in such a vague manner as to have no impact whatsoever. For example the USDA finally ruled that dairy cows must have “access to pasture” in order to be considered organic. Sounds nice, but it means simply that at some point in the cows life the owner must provide them access to somewhere outside of a building for a minute or so. The same is true for chickens. Organic free-range chickens means that they are not kept in individual cages but instead in massive layers with access to the outside. Michael Pollan visited Petaluma Poultry and gave this description upon visiting what he says look like military barracks:
“I donned what looked like a hooded white hazmat suit—since the birds receive no antibiotics yet live in close confinement, the company is ever worried about infection, which could doom a whole house overnight—and stepped inside. Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground hugging white cloud, clucking softly. The air was warm and humid and smelled powerfully of ammonia; the fumes caught in my throat. Twenty thousand is a lot of chickens…sipping from waterers suspended from the ceiling, [nibbling] organic food from elevated trays connected by tubes to a silo outside, and [doing] pretty much everything chickens do except step outside the little doors located at either end of the shed.”

The doors lead into a fifteen foot wide grassy yard outside the shed—which none of the chickens have ever been seen in. This is far from the picturesque farm depicted on most organic products and far from what most people would consider truly organic. At the 2000 inaugural speech, USDA Secretary Glickman went out of his way to point out that “The organic label is a marketing too, it is not a statement about food safety. Nor is ‘organic’ a value judgment about nutrition or quality.” So if the government is not going to provide us with a reasonable food system what can we do?
Education plays an essential role in the future of sustainability and agriculture. Billions of dollars are spent annually convincing civilization that they want to live on Big Mac’s and carbonated corn soda. The reality is by the time we are actually old enough to be in charge of our own food supply we have been fairly well saturated with these messages. Therefore, it seems to be more prudent to bring the youth to farms and involve them with their own food choices. They then can understand what they are eating as well how we can produce it in synchronization with nature. Once that stream of thought expands into enough people, we will return to understanding the earth and how we can live in symbiotic agricultural harmony. Places like the Center for Land Based Learning (CLBL) and the Farm Based Education Association provide such experience and are essential to the future of our food system and health. The CLBL focuses on High School students in order to shape the way people think about the earth its role in the production of our food system. Some of these people may not go into the industry. Some may become farmers themselves. Some could even become the politicians who design a future farm bill. With our current agri-business model, farming is becoming just like any corporation where the bottom line is the only thing in sight. The business people do not know what organic really means, much less do they care about their impact on the earth. It may be difficult to argue with the millions of dollars these businesses bring home but if these ideas are imparted at an early age we may have a better chance to realize the destruction that comes with that profit and therein a better chance to really save the earth and the people it supports.


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