reforming the farm

There is great open letter/essay to the president by Michael Pollan (HT Brian McLaren) on the topic of food and farming in America. His basic argument is that we need to move away from oil based single crop farming and instead move towards more sustainable practices of sun-centered farming.

I got rather carried away, but here are my selected quotes, which I found especially worthy of reproduction. I would recommend taking the time to read the whole essay though, both theory and application are both very interesting and thought provoking

It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third.

After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides.

That seems pretty creepy, really makes you want to think twice before ever using that stuff. I can’t help but link the rise of so many health problems linked to origins of the fertilizers that were used on the soils.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

There are some many other ways, which he mentions, of how a diverse farm solves some many of the problems that the modern farm created, and weren’t really there before. Through crop rotations you can eliminate a lot of the use of herbicides. Also mixing certain crops, those companion plants, also for benefitual results for both against things like insects.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.
When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime.

He goes on to say how all the excess produce which is produced would go to local organizations which help those in need; now that seems like such an awesome symbol of hope and change, but also it is real. The hope and change would be real, a hope that you could taste.

Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry — the culinary nequivalent of home schooling.

This was personally a very funny thought, funny enough in fact that I had to read it out loud to my wife. I think I might be some mix of these two extremes.

Cheap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

This is probably going to be the hardest thing to convince people of, a generation that has grown up with the reality of cheap food being their own only reality. It seems very hard to convince people that it is really worth it to want to spend more on food.

This definitely helped to get me excited about the coming garden/farming season. Hopefully much enjoyable time in the dirt and many Saturday mornings traveling to the farmer’s market for vegetables and socializing.