The Way we Grow Food

I have written a number of posts so far about our relationship to trees, I want now to write about our relationship to growing food.  There is the famous joke about the child who is asked where their food comes from and they say: "the grocery store".   In essence most city dwelling folks live as if that were the truth.

When civilization went from hunter/gathers to agriculturalist - they were still fairly close to the Earth and her rhythms so they initially mimicked the way nature grew things.  If you look at indigenous growing methods versus "modern" farmers, you will note a significant difference.   The more technology we developed the more "high tech" we went with how we did agriculture - so we started plowing up the earth to plant it ( this disturbance of the soil massively releases carbon from the earth) and with the advent of the internal combustion engine we plowed up bigger and bigger areas of land.  Clever men who lived out of  a mindset of being the dominant species and having "dominion" over the land came up with ideas like mono-cropping and the use of fossil fuel based fertilizers and "pesticides" and the engineering of sterile seeds - moving further away from the way in which nature naturally fertilizes with the decay of previous life, or the way in which plant health and plant placement can protect against "pests".   The Great Dust Bowl, taught us nothing about the failing of this way of farming and on we continued.   Now numerous studies show that we have depleted the nutrients in the soil by plowing and monocropping and that the food we are producing is nutrient poor.

Part of my climate activism over the past 5 years has been to try to bring to people's attention the connection between climate change and industrial agriculture.  As it turns out the production of meat is a very energy intensive way of producing protein.   We have a much lighter GHG foot print if we eat less to no meat.  Additionally Americans waste 1/3 of all food that is produced.  Some is left in the field, some is spoiled along the 1,200 average transit route, and some in stores or restaurants, but 1/4 of everything we buy winds up being thrown out.  This is also a huge waste of all the energy used to produce and transport that food.  Then there is the energy waste itself of the 1,200 mile route that food takes from field to table because of how processed much of our food is and the transporting of food from other countries so we can eat out of season.

But finally and most significantly is the huge fossil fuel use in industrial agricultures way of producing food versus that of Organic or Regenerative Agriculture.  As previously mentioned industrial agriculture for the most part now uses huge plots of land that cannot be worked by one family.   They are plowed and monocropped both depleting the soil.   But the pesticides kill the microbiome  in the soil which both effect the health of the plants but also the nutrients produced by the plants.   Plants have been bred for shipability and distorted from what Mother nature originally created.  Thus we have styrofoam tomatoes, peaches and strawberries. We have watermelon's without seeds= sterile.  People my age will remember when you could get those things only in the summer and when they had rich flavors - now only vaguely reminiscent of their former glory, and sadly young people do not even know how good these things can taste.

We have all kinds of unintended side effects, mostly unacknowledged or reported on the margins were few learn.  Example Colony Bee Collapse disorder is infecting and killing whole bee hives, causing the loss of 30 to 40% of bees each year.  Bees pollinate 1/3 of all the food we eat.  This potentially threatens our food supply severely.   At first they did not know why but now it has been clear for at least 5 years it is from one of the most commonly used pesticides in American - outlawed in Europe but which our strong pesticide lobby has kept protected despite its implication as well in human health problems.

Because the monocropping and huge government subsides for only certain crops: corn, soybeans, milk, etc lead to huge surpluses of certain foods, the men in the labs came up with increasing other ways to use these products.  It is why we have corn syrup and all kinds of corn based artificial sweeteners.  As a result our highly processed foods all have corn by products in them and we have much higher levels of sugar consumption than ever in history - and an epidemic of diabetes, even in children (rare even 100 years ago)...not to mention a host of other health issues related to also having the highest level of meat consumption in history.   Big Agriculture has been dictating how we eat for most of my life rather than the consumer driving demand for what we eat.

Organic farming is a move towards removing the chemicals out of farming.  But various Republican administrations and even farmers who would like to claim the greater price without really changing how they farm have nibbled away at the edges of what the organic certification means so that various "exceptions are being made". 

 Regenerative attempts to go beyond organic, beyond simply removing the chemicals to again adopting techniques like low-till/no till, crop rotation, cover crops, quorum sensing (diversity of plants at the maximum number for plant well being), residue retention (leaving the roots and dead plants after harvest to replenish the earth rather than pulling them and depleting the soil more), using compost rather than synthetic fertilizer, etc.   In addition it means planting trees again in pastures to provide shade for cattle rather than the weird notion that pastures much be empty, it means moving cattle from area to area allowing some areas to grow back while cattle are gone, allowing multiple plants to grow in pastures, and allowing "alley cropping" the growth of trees in the allies between rows of plant food.  In short we could say to begin to listen to the rhythm and design of nature and get in sync with it rather than trying to enforce our will upon it and "tame" it.  Regenerative farmings alignment with natural ways keeps the microbial life alive in the soil, draws down carbon into the soil and once again produces nutrient rich food.

I have written before about going myself from seeing trees as a solution to climate change to recognizing how I was still participating in the paradigm that simply related to them as things - useful things but things.  This same paradigm relates to how we see farming.  If we see this as a practice of producing valued things for humans than the Earth is simply something to take from or to "manage".   However, if we see ourselves in relationship with the Earth, as part of her complex network of interwoven life forms - then it is obvious that we must tune into the natural cycles of the Earth to grow food with her.  When I think of it that way eating locally, eating seasonally, eating regeneratively grown food and eating low on the food chain all just bring me back into rhythm with the Living Earth of which I am a part....a very small part.