At the Kellogg Conference, I've heard anecdotally that conventional farmers are turning to organic fertilizers, because of the shortage and spike in prices in conventional fertilizers made with fossil fuel. If anyone knows more about this please let me know or post a comment.
- Samuel Fromartz
Check out the pictures of a group of organic dairy farmers in Britain doing Tai Chi. So my question is, what do the cows do?
Grist has launched a farming and food series called Sow What?, with a lead-off piece by Tom Philpott looking at the Mars and Venus of industrial and sustainable agriculture in Iowa. Highly recommended.
Image source: Grist.org
Here's the short film of the flooded Midwest farmers by Madison filmmakers Gretta Wing Miller and Aarick Beher, who talked to some of those mentioned in the post I wrote on the floods.
Gretta informs she explored the organic farms previously in a full-length documentary called "Back to the Land...Again," released in 2006. I haven't seen the doc but it's touring with the intriguingly named Rural Route Film Festival.
And now, without further delay, the short:
You probably saw the pictures of flooded farms, overflowing rivers, and the rain that swamped the Upper Midwest last month.
What you might not know is that organic vegetable farmers in the region had severe losses. I knew one of them, Jack Hedin, who owns Featherstone Farm, in southeastern Minnesota.
His farm is nestled in the Wiscoy Valley, beside a tiny stream called Money Creek, literally ground zero for the storm. When it rained, and kept on raining (a total of 26 inches), the creek overflowed, swamped fields, flooded a packing shed and cooler and washed out roads. A levee in the nearby town of Rushford gave way and the town was devastated.
Reached on his cell in a field, Jack told me he lost $200,000 worth of crops – and not just in his fields. (The image at left shows a flooded corn field at Featherstone).
The day the rain began to fall, his crew had picked 10 pallets of cantaloupes and put them in a cooler. But the power went out overnight during the storm and by the time he rigged up a generator the next day, the melons were rotten.
In nearby Wisconsin, Richard de Wilde of Harmony Valley Farm, told me his organic vegetable losses reached $750,000, or about two-thirds of his annual produce revenue.
Featherstone and Harmony Valley are relatively large organic produce farms in the upper Midwest, selling to co-op and Whole Foods stores as well as through their CSAs. (The image below shows washed out top soil at Harmony Valley Farm). The region is home to one of the highest concentration of organic farms in the nation.
They weren't alone with losses, just the biggest. Two others, Avalanche Organics and Driftless Organics, were also hit. You can see a short video of the farmers by Madison filmmaker Gretta Wing Miller here.
The floods came at a particularly devastating moment, for the end of August marks the height of production. Before then, farms are running up expenses. But around the first week of September, the harvest comes in and so does the cash.
Hedin had drawn down $89,000 on a working credit line and was planning on repaying it with the fall harvest. He pared expenses, cutting his crew to 11 workers from 19.
While many of Hedin's fields were under water, a number on dry, higher ground had made it through without damage. He figured he had about $90,000 in crops remaining, but they had to be picked if he was going to make that money.
Retailers Respond
In the days after the storm, co-op supermarkets called up and started buying. Some took mark-ups of only a few cents per item, emphasizing that the produce was coming from badly hit farms. A non-profit called Sow the Seeds Fund, spearheaded by the co-ops and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, also started a fund-raising drive to raise money for the farmers.
Whole Foods, a big customer for these farms, initially took a different tack, placing a moratorium on purchases because of concerns about food safety.
Bobby Turner, Whole Foods VP of purchasing in the Midwest, told me he first looked into the issue after a store customer sent an email asking if the produce was safe. He talked with another central produce manager as well as USDA officials. Based on these talks, the company decided to ban all produce from the flooded counties until the farms carried out what's known as a USDA GAP (Good Agricultural Practices) audit of their fields, at Whole Foods' expense.
The fear was that stream water containing potentially toxic e. coli (from nearby dairy farms) and banned pesticides would have flooded the fields, contaminating the produce.
It was around this time I got a critical email from a farmer outside the region (yes, farmers talk to each other) describing Whole Foods as a "fair weather friend." Jim Slama, an organic and local food advocate in Chicago, with the non-profit, Sustain, told me he heard similar complaints and began working the phones with contacts at Whole Foods.
The farmers were cognizant of food safety concerns, but they argued their fields on higher ground had not flooded, so a need for a total purchasing ban was overblown.
De Wilde actually tested his fields for pathogens and got two positive hits for e. coli contamination, but it was only on rotted crops in flooded areas next to a stream.
All his other fields and crops tested negative.
Turner soon flew out from Chicago to visit the farms, walking the fields and learning the extent of the damage. He realized the moratorium had been enacted too quickly. Within a day, Whole Foods reversed itself and was buying again.
"We could have been more compassionate, and more communicative," he said.
Writing Checks
De Wilde said his 875 CSA customers who get a box of produce a week will absorb about one-third of his $750,000 loss, in the form of smaller boxes. (This demonstrates the viability of the CSA system, in which the customer shares the farmers' risk by paying up front for a full season's worth of goods. They get the bounty, or shortfall.) His CSA customers remain fiercely loyal, in fact, they've gone beyond loyal, and have raised $25,000 for the farm.
He, alone among the farmers, also had crop insurance but it only covered $100,000 in losses.
Local co-ops in the Twin Cities are also seeing a rush of donations to help the farmers. Barth Anderson of the Wedge Co-Op in Minneapolis told me the store had raised about $10,000. One customer even wrote an $800 check at the cash register.
Whole Foods is donating $25,000 to Sow the Seeds and will match another $10,000 donated by customers at the cash register.
"Whole Foods is back to buying everything we have, there's no arguing about price, and they're telling us, 'We want to be aware of any surplus product you have,'" Hedin recounted.
Silver Lining?
The crisis may have a silver lining, since the farmers and Whole Foods are discussing three issues that are central to ensuring a sustainable supply of local food:
Turner said the company is cognizant of these issues and committed to sourcing from these farmers. He said the company has appointed a manager in charge of local foods, who ironically began work just as the storm hit.
The bigger question is whether these farms will be in business the coming year. De Wilde thinks he can squeeze through the crisis and Hedin is also optimistic, but he's not sure how he'll handle his debt. I've heard other farms are struggling but no one has dropped out of the race.
Through all of this, one thing is certain: good partners - and fanatical customers - are key.
Image credits: Featherstone Farm, Harmony Valley Farm via the Wedge co-op.
© Chews Wise 2007
By Samuel Fromartz
Organic food is often portrayed by its critics as a low-yielding farming method that undercuts the main goal of food production – feeding the world.
These critics also argue that if organic farming were to grow much beyond its tiny elitist niche, forests would have to be plowed under because a much greater land mass would be needed to make up for far lower crop yields.
Pretty sad picture isn't it? Organic farming is portrayed as an inferior agricultural method that ends up raping and pillaging the natural world.
The only problem with this argument is that it doesn't square with the facts. (Nor with the actual picture if you check out the organic wheat field pictured above that was part of a USDA trial).
Although many studies have countered these arguments, three recent ones deserve notice.
First, researchers at the University of Michigan recently published a new study in the Journal of Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems that evaluated 293 studies comparing conventional and organic farming.
They found that in the developed world, such as the US, Europe and Japan, organic farming methods yielded slightly less than conventional methods.
But importantly, in the developing world, where food-scarcity is most pronounced, organic methods were actually two- to three-times as productive as conventional agriculture.
Farmers in poorer nations often could not afford the chemicals and fertilizers that are required by high-yielding seed varieties. By farming organically, they could enhance soil fertility by composting waste sources on their farms.
The researchers write that organic farming could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base.
"My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you can’t produce enough food through organic agriculture," said Ivette Perfecto, a professor at University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment, and a principle on the study.
She added that the idea people would go hungry if farming went organic was "ridiculous." (You can listen to a brief interview with the researcher).
Another report out of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Iowa is also significant, for it demonstrates the long-term yield potential of organic methods.
The now nine-year-old trials "convincingly show greater yield, increased profitability, and steadily improved soil quality in organic over conventional rotations," the Leopold Center stated.
The longest running rotation of corn, followed by soybeans, oats with alfalfa, and then another crop of alfalfa, produced 188 bushels per acre of organic corn in 2006. The traditional corn-soybean rotation on conventional fields yielded 177 bushels/acre – a 6 percent deficit from the organic fields.
In soybeans, the organic fields produced 45 bushels per acre in this long rotation, compared with 43 bushels on conventional plots.
Over eight years of data, here's the average corn yield in the various methods:
Those include the first three years of the organic transition. If you back those years out, and only look at the organic fields post-transition you get these average yields:
The study shows that well-managed organic crop rotations, which are key to organic farming practices, actually lead to slightly higher yields than conventional chemical methods and rotations. And in the current ethanol-infused corn boom, farmers are forgoing the traditional corn-soybean rotation and growing continuous corn on corn, which requires a greater amount of chemical fertilizers to keep the yield up.
Finally, organic farming gets criticized for its tillage practices, which critics say leads to soil erosion and leaches nitrates into groundwater. These critics say conventional "no-till" farm methods, associated with genetically modified crops and heavy doses of herbicides, are superior.
But again, the facts point to a different conclusion. USDA researchers report that organic farming methods actually produced healthier soils than no-till conventional methods.
In a nine-year study at the Henry A. Wallace Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland, USDA researchers found that the addition of organic matter in manure and cover crops more than offset losses from tillage.
In a final three-year study, corn was grown with no-till practices on all plots to see which ones had the most productive soils. The organic plots had more carbon and nitrogen and yielded 18 percent more corn.
Needless to say, critics won't be convinced by this evidence. But then neither do those who continually assert, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that global warming doesn't exist.
We know better.
The supermarket, of course. The BBC reports:
The Linking Environment and Farming organization found 22% of 1,073 adults questioned did not know bacon and sausages originate from farms.
Some 47% of people did not know farms produced porridge's main ingredient.
I guess we have quite a ways to go in bringing awareness of food and farming into the mainstream, though this survey was surprising to me. Forget about the debate of local and organic, people don't even know food comes from farms. (Via Gristmill).
The suspension of a mega-organic dairy in California continues to generate attention, with the most recent from a neighbor who had the foresight to take video of the operation and post it on her blog, Rebuild from Depression. She also has a very insightful post about the operation that I recommend others to read.
What this work shows is that producers and consumers are very interested in transparency and, with the use of the Internet, will out those producers who are skirting the regulations. This is what transparency is all about and what underpins organic and sustainable foods.
Without further adieu, on to the video eulogy. (Note on video: It views better if you download the whole thing before playing unless you have a fast connection).
Carol Ness in the SF Chronicle has a good follow-up to our breaking story yesterday about the Vander Eyk dairy being stripped of organic certification in California. This is a very significant enforcement action in the organic world, though it begs a few questions.
If confinement dairy practices aren't corrected, then the next phase will be to design an additional label for organic milk that truly reflects organic practices such as pasturing - a prospect that is now being floated. That would be a shame and a cause of additional consumer confusion but that will happen if the USDA's National Organic Program does not move forward with a pasture rule that would outlaw these kind of operations.
Dole Organic began putting a little sticker on its bananas earlier this year, allowing consumers to see where the fruit was grown. I blogged on this months ago. Now they've taken the program further, allowing for interaction with the farm. Dole has posted an email one customer wrote and then an amazing number of responses from workers on the banana plantation in La Guajira, Colombia.
Photos: Dole Organic
Among a few choice quotes:
"I evaluate the agronomical practices at the banana fields. Your letter made me feel that my work is appreciated. Thank you very much!" - Dulcinis Atencio
"You said you will keep us in your mind every time you eat an organic banana, we promise to keep you in mind every time we pack your bananas. Thank you for your letter." - Midelfi Mejías
"Everything started with this small sticker with the three digits... It is hard to believe that this tiny piece of paper created a beautiful link between you and all of us in Don Pedro ...I put the stickers on the organic bananas." - Tatiana Barros
OK, I know this is PR. I know the statements come through the company. I know this reveals little about the actual operation. But the appreciation expressed by the workers was pretty amazing, as if they were finally recognized for growing food! What a thought.
I encourage people to read this new experiment in the farmer-consumer connection over thousands of miles. Thanks to Luis Monge, regional certification officer for Dole's Organic Program, for the shout out on this development.
Carl Safina: Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas
Charles Clover: The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat
Daniel Charles: Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food
Joan Dye Gussow: This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader
Michael Pollan: Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
