Is Organic and Local "so 2008"?

By Lisa M. Hamilton

Organic and Local is so 2008—or at least that’s the case that journalist and “The End of Food” author Paul Roberts makes in Mother Jones this month. The gist of his argument: because the food system’s problems are so deep, the food movement needs to mature beyond its one-dimensional, at times robotic devotion to Organic and Local and instead adopt a broader range of solutions.

He offers the example of Fred Fleming, a noted Washington wheat farmer whose masterful no-till system has greatly reduced erosion from his land. Fleming remains outside the foodie circle because his system depends on using herbicide, but Roberts argues that he is just the sort of farmer we should be embracing.   Roberts does make an important point: agriculture faces many more issues than whether or not farmers use pesticides; to boot, all of those issues are currently being compounded by climate change.

Wes Jackson of the Land Institute recently made a related point underscoring the threat we face from soil erosion. He argues that the most damaging climate-change-related weather events we’re seeing are not hurricanes hitting the Eastern seaboard, but heavy rainfall and floods in the Midwest. In Jackson’s view, even the destruction wreaked by Katrina did not compare to the long-term loss we suffer from having millions of tons of farmland topsoil washed away in floods, as happened last March and April. I can imagine Roberts chiming in to say that if using some Roundup would hold that soil in place, the tradeoff would be worthwhile. It’s hard to disagree with that. 

But after hearing Roberts make his case live at Organicology in February, I would argue that he’s too near-sighted with his remedy. Rather than embrace farmers’ lesser-of-many-evils practices within the existing system, we need to overhaul the system itself. As it is, farmers are expected to be purely economic beings that fit into the free market alongside mortgage securities; the true solution instead lies in seeing them as the ecological caretakers we so desperately need them to be.

Think of it roughly like the National Parks: Years ago, we as a nation recognized the need for large areas of land to be taken out of the real estate market for the express purpose of maintaining them according to a different set of priorities; we saw that wild lands served the public good, and that not protecting them was to our detriment. Well, now we’ve reached the same situation with our working lands, as the constant pressure of the market system has led them to a threatened existence.

I’m not suggesting we buy up farmland and make it government property, but rather that we recognize farmers and ranchers as a kind of public servant. To begin with, replace the Farm Bill’s provisions for subsidies and incentives for commodity production with a true support system of financing, education, and farmer-centered research and market development; that could enable growers to switch their focus from bank notices to caring for their lands long-term. In time, probably most would gravitate to ecological methods such as the organic no-till farming system that Rodale has been developing for the past decade. 

Some, though, might choose herbicide-dependent no-till as the suture that would hold their land in place. In that lies the greatest challenge of supporting farmers: trusting that given the proper tools, they know and will do what’s best for the land. I believe that trust is where Roberts’ argument was leading, even if it didn’t quite reach that conclusion in the MoJo article. If so, it’s a step in the right direction.

Northern California-based writer/photographer Lisa M. Hamilton focuses on food and agriculture. Her book "Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness" (Counterpoint) comes out in May. 

Comments

[Ed Bruske]

Interesting, Sam. Last summer I spent time with Drew Norman, who operates a huge CSA produce farm in Baltimore County, and he was mulling something very similar to Fleming. In order to maintain the organic content of his soil, he's thinking about a no-till system that he thought would require herbicides. He was wondering how his CSA customers would swallow that.

[Sam Fromartz]

The reason the "organic and local" idea has such resonance is that most people come to farming through the food -- in trying to reduce their own risks that they perceive in the food chain and to improve quality/freshness of food and the connection with the farmer. You will find a lot more people getting behind those ideas than into the specifics of no-till farming and herbicide use, so that's why it's central to the discussion.

There are limitations to this food centric vision, in terms of what can actually be produced locally (as Roberts points out in his piece) and in organic as well, which is only 3% of the market. But what I found odd is that Roberts held up the herbicide-using no till as the future, since organic does point the way as well. Talk to produce farmers and you will find many that are adopting organic methods on conventional farms because they work. In other words, there are a spectrum of solutions and they tend to feed off one another (as long as the intellectual property behind them is open-source, which isn't always the case with crops in no-till systems).

I also thought - like many commentators on Mother Jones - that Roberts was disingenuous about the old organic ag/feed the world straw man. Most of the world is organic by default and the issue is getting methods (open source seeds, even fertilizers) that will improve yield. But to suggest that no-till corn or soybean farming is somehow the answer to feed the world is myopic. Ninety percent of this crop goes to animal feed and those animals are not feeding the poorest, but only those that can afford meat as incomes increase and diets change. And this change toward a global meat-centric diet is unsustainable - and this from a meat eater.

I also think Lisa puts too much trust in the farmer to protect the land. There have been too many instances of farmers screwing things up, with chemicals, bad choices, monocultures, etc., not alone, of course, prodded by a whole institution of agriculture. But given choices, they don't always make the right or best ones. So I see no reason to give farmers a blank check. There is a reason that the organic regime at least requires inspections. And yes - incentives for them to do the right thing makes every bit of sense too.

[Farmer K]

The one most important management consideration of our productive lands has only lightly been touched on here. The debate is not about using no-till with herbicide to try to keep the soil in place in grain production but is continuous grain production the best use of that land. Our current production ag system of commodity grain production and concentrated livestock facilities has created many more problems than it has solved. One being the soil erosion issue of continuous grain production. Do we really need all of the current grain production for our livestock? Doesn't it make sense to put a lot of these fields back into pasture and forage production and put the ruminants back out on the land and feed them primarily forages? I could go on and on. The bottom line is we need to rethink the entire production system. Not try to tweak a failed system with many detrimental side effects.

I still operate a 5th generation family farm in southern Illinois and have the same concerns Wes Jackson does. If we had enough of those Midwest fields in pasture and forages needed to replace the grain we are feeding ruminants a lot less topsoil would have washed into the streams, rivers, and Gulf of Mexico.