F.A. Farm

Toni and I just finished watching an old NOVA program on the Lake Missoula floods. These were glacial floods that carved out the channeled scablands of central Washington, the Columbia Gorge and petered out in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. As some of you may know, Missoula, Montana is at the center of five valleys - one of the reasons it has a smog problem in the winter. During the last Ice Age, a great ice dam would form periodically and block up the water from what is now known as the Clark Fork River. At the base of the ice dam, the water molecules could not expand and so did not become solid - in effect, supercooled water under intense pressure. This water looked for points of release and expanded any and all cracks until the ice dam cracked from the inside out. When it finally gave way, trillions of gallons of water were released and flowed west through Washington, the Gorge and down into the Willamette Valley, as well as to the sea. It only took a few hours and was truly a spectacular cataclysmic event. It is also likely that there were several such events and some Paleo-Indians may have been witness to some of the events, as they happened between 20,000 - 15,000 years ago. However, there are no stories in the myths of the indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest that I know about.

One of the interesting features of these Lake Missoula floods is the presence of glacial erratics scattered about the landscape. Glacial erratics are huge boulders strewn about the landscape in odd places. You can see them in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon, as well as in the channeled scablands of central Washington. They come about as glaciers move across a landscape and sheer off hunks of rock and assimilate them into the moving ice sheet. They then are deposited as the glaciers melt. In the Lake Missoula floods, the glacial erratics were probably carried in the chunks of ice that broke off the huge pieces of the ice dam as it moved through the landscape and then settled out as the ice chunks melted.

Toni and I are sort of like glacial erratics. We were assimilated into the great Movement of the 60's, as so many of our comrades were, and carried along in the tide of social unrest. When the flood settled out and the protective shell melted, we ended up scattered about the landscape. It is quite amusing that we ended up as glacial erratics (and yes, we are often erratic!) in Vancouver on the same ground as the glacial erratics of the great Lake Missoula floods. Then we sort of rolled up the coast to Ferndale. So here we are and we are still erratic. There are many of us scattered about the landscape and sometimes we recognize each other.

Today I spent some time watching futbol - specifically the Champions League between Chelsea and Juventus (Chelsea 1-0). Imagine my surprise to see the name New Holland emblazoned on the Juventus uniforms. I say the world must be changing for the better when a manufacturer of farm tractors is sponsoring a premier Italian team. O-lay, O-lay, O-lay, O-lay!!!

On February 20th, Toni and I went to a discussion of the New Recovery Plan by a local US Congressman. During the question period, I asked him about the effect of frozen credit on spring planting. My point was that mainstream US agriculture depends on credit to plant and grow the crops. If there is no credit from the banks, there will be reduced acreage planted and consumers will wake up in July and August and wonder where the wheat and corn is. The Congressman acknowledged my worry and said that many national leaders see this also. However, there was no mention of what is being done to unfreeze credit and there was NO URGENCY expressed. I suddenly realized why some of the more perspicacious of the local Dems don't like this person. I don't see anything being done in the short time frame we have left, so is there some government intervention behind the scenes to actually fix this problem in the 2-3 months we have left before planting? Since the government colluded with corporations and banks to get us into this mess, it doesn't seem likely they are working to fix it and that the impasse we see in front of us is all there is.

Let's assume for a moment that a significant decrease in spring planting is inevitable this spring. By significant, I mean a greater than 5% decrease in acres planted. Some might say this is not a significant percentage, but I suggest a simple thought exercise in demographics - imagine a 5% increase in unemployment in the next 2 months. As for a 5% significance level, that is just a common metric from statistics and I am using it as a threshold of significance. (In other words, let's start with a small effect that would impact our lives in a significant manner.)

So, with a significant decrease in corn, soy, and wheat acreage planted in the Midwest, prices for livestock feed rise, simply because most grain in this country is fed to cattle, hogs and poultry. The rise in feed prices causes a rise in the price of meat, which in turn causes meat consumption to decrease. An oversupplied market will then find a level at which consumers can afford to buy meat, but this will not likely be cost effective for the farmers. Then farmers will cull their herds and flocks. This then causes an oversupply of meat, which depresses prices. By now, it is Christmas 2009 and there is a plentiful amount of meat on store shelves. It is even within the realm of possibility to buy beef for Christmas this year for 50 cents a pound (!). Good times will be back for the consumer - but only for a few months. Once the relative supply of beef (ongoing production and an infinite resource) becomes the absolute supply of beef (culling herds - a finite resource), there will be very little calving, farrowing and hatching to make up the lost reserves. Then there will be a shortage of meat on top of the shortage of grain. If the credit freeze of spring 2009 is still on and becomes the credit freeze of spring 2010, there will be even less planting than the previous year. The shortage of grain in the summer/fall of 2010 then becomes a serious matter.

An alternative hypothesis is that there is no significant shortfall in credit available to farmers to plant. Then we are simply faced with "business as usual," which is still problematic. Prices for wheat continue to fall below the cost of production, so it may be prudent for farmers to plant less anyway. So there will be stresses and strains and the inflationary pressures in the current economy may push food prices up anyway. If the meat producers do not cull their herds in a significant manner, there will be plenty of backup in the system to adapt quickly to a fair price for the farmer. However, this still means prices for meat will probably rise this year. I also see prices for vegetables and fruit rising as well, but that is because of a rise in transport costs.

Which hypothesis will play out depends on the credit market. Thus, modern US agriculture is dependent on bankers at the tiller, bankers who are besieged from all sides and flailing around on a ship in a governmentally-produced fog of regulations and policies, balancing on a rolling deck while cannons broken from their moorings are rolling back and forth and even firing on a randomly selected time-delay. It is not a pretty sight.

The bottom line is that agriculture is subject to a time lag in supply and demand. Without thinking ahead to next year, we lose out. You cannot just go to the marketplace and buy more steel to make a widget. You have to get the seeds in the ground at a certain time of the year. Also note that the US is still a net exporter of food, so if we screw up in the next 2-3 months, the whole world will suffer.

Yesterday I got some high profile pork sausage at the local co-op. The pork came with its own brochure, which I read to my wife this morning over coffee. We had such a good time yukking it up, I thought I would share it with you. DISCLAIMER: I raised purebred Hampshire hogs back in 1965, so I know about pork. I am also quite peeved about the rise of branding. Anyways, here are some of the brochure claims with my translations.

[Their pork has a brand name] "Our pork is given that name because every pig on our farms is free to go outside to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine!" TRANSLATION: Our pigs live in sheds and they root around outside in their pen.

"[The brand name] houses are specifically designed to provide comfort and pleasure for our pigs. TRANSLATION: They have dirt floors.

"All pigs have free access to food and water courts, are free to lounge in the spacious deep-bedded areas, or bask in the sunshine at their leisure." TRANSLATION: The pigs are fed with self-feeders so we don't have to slop them twice a day. The pig sheds have straw bedding. I used to do the same.

"[The brand name] houses are also designed to 'breathe' freely and naturally with open sides." TRANSLATION: Our hog sheds have had the windows knocked out. As my ag instructor used to say, "You can throw a cat through."

"Translucent curtains provide protection from harsh weather while still allowing fresh air and sunlight in at all times." TRANSLATION: We have plastic up over the windows, but it has torn off in places.

Well, after my little exercise in marketing translation, I just want to wish these people well. The pork was actually okay and I will probably buy more. We don't eat much pork anymore, but I do like sausage once a month or two. What Toni and I found hilarious was the gentrification of pig farming. I am surprised they didn't mention their "pig spa." TRANSLATION: We run a hose out into the dirt and turn it on once in awhile so the pigs can lay in the mud.

The US has quite a bit of arable land still available. Estimates on the Web range from 302 million to 470 million acres. Since I am a sustainable farmer, I know how much food I can grow, how many potential calories are available through human labor, and other parameters for how many people we can actually feed with only minimal use of petroleum products. Let's take the low figure of 302 million acres of arable land. Certainly this includes land which must be irrigated, but there were several traditional cultures that managed to grow food in extremely arid environments and did quite well. One example was the Hohokam in the area now known as Phoenix, Arizona. They had an extensive network of irrigation canals that could conceivably serve as models. There are ways to do irrigation that are relatively low impact and many farmers and environmentalists are advancing this approach. In other words, irrigation should not be a limiting factor in how much arable land can be used for production.

What about labor then? What intensive petroleum use does is allow many more acres to be farmed by fewer people. Yet we have a lot of people that will soon be out of work, if they are not already. One of the "untouchable" subjects in most discussions of transitioning to a saner society is the idea that we will have to dramatically increase the number of people doing manual labor. My estimate is that we will need 10-20% of the population actively working full-time as farmers. So . . . as a farmer, I will have to feed myself and either 4 other people, or feed myself and 9 other people. This is certainly doable as I now produce enough calories on 2 acres to feed approximately 10 people with a daily calorie requirement of 2500 calories.

Is land use and ownership a problem? Yes it is. However, since we are talking inevitability of dieoff unless we act like an aggregate of local communities, I don't see land use as continuing to be as narrowly strait-jacketed as it currently is. In other words, people with land will be forced to realize the benefits of growing food and will have people ready to work the land in labor-intensive, small-scale agriculture. A land of small farmers growing food on postage stamp-size lots is not just a fantasy, but rather the likeliest way that the future will develop, given the lack of leadership from government, coupled with the intransigence of public employees (elected or not) to do anything without extreme prodding.

To sum up, how much food can we grow on 300 million acres of arable land? I suggest we can feed 1.5 billion (300 million acres X 5 people per acre). Many of you old fogey types (and even some of you "new" fogey types) will scoff, but I suggest we can actually feed the world via small-scale intensive agriculture. When oil was cheap, millions were starving because of inadequate world-wide distribution and corporate greed. I suggest that the future starving millions will still be the result of inadequate world-wide distribution and corporate greed, NOT because we cannot raise the food without cheap oil.

During a discussion on pricing last week, I was attacked for not wanting to pay what I considered a high price for a meat product. Even though I am also poor and do not make an adequate salary for the work I do, I am supposed to pay whatever prices other sustainable farmers charge. The rationale seems to be some sort of fuzzy concept of "solidarity." However, there was a disconnect here in actual pricing policy that is fundamental to all these discussions. Most farmers are certainly not receiving a fair price and we ALL work hard. Even the mainstream farmers riding in an air-conditioned cab for 14 hours at a time - plowing, discing and planting - are being physically drained by their work. So. . . if we are price-takers we just have to take whatever price the stockyards or the elevator or the creamery pays. If we are price-makers, the burden is on us to establish adequate prices. Notice that I did not say "fair" prices. If we just use a simplistic forumula of    feed costs + capital costs + overhead + fair value for labor involved = fair retail price    we will certainly never get a fair price. Thus we can just dismiss it. Nevertheless, I see quite a lot of sustainable agriculturalists stuck in this trap and they are always "on point and ready to argue" in any discussion you fall into with them. Here is a better solution and one that has proven to be robust over the last several years. I take a baseline wholesale price, bump it up 30-40% and then do market-basket comparisons at two local chain stores. I then "triangulate" my retail price in the midst of all three prices. Once I have done that, I tweak the prices based on actual retail experience of the market. For example, I may arrive at $2.89 a pound for beans, but I know I can get $3.25 a pound. This system works well for me and it completely negates the idea of a "fair" price. It is still demand-driven and has more than a little bit of price-taking in it, but it is a step forward. After all, it doesn't make any sense to charge $30 a pound for dry beans when I cannot get it. I certainly have crops that I do not sell because I cannot get a fair price and I don't expect someone to buy from me because of "solidarity." Times are difficult and there are even more difficult times ahead. Valid, systematic ways of doing our pricing may be very helpful in the future.

Modern agriculture is oriented towards economies of scale. This is usually presented as a one-way street - get big or get out. However, there is a flawed assumption here that needs to be addressed. Economies of scale are based on a price per unit that does not fall, while the cost per unit does fall. Pretty simple. Produce more widgets in your factory and you spread the cost of your rent or mortgage payment over a wider base and the cost of each unit goes down (total cost includes cost to produce plus your overhead). You can also reduce your cost per unit by getting more production out of each worker. If we translate this into a farming scenario, we can get our chickens to produce more eggs or use our acreage to produce more crops and decrease our cost per unit by choosing better breeds, keeping our chickens healthier and happier, feeding the soil so our plants are healthier and happier, etc.The point here is that economies of scale are not based on increasing the size of the operation - building a bigger factory or buying up more land to farm. Economies of scale are based on utilizing what we already have to the fullest extent. I suspect that what is usually touted as the economies of scale is simply a marketing scheme to grow the economy in a somewhat strait-jacketed manner. Build more factories! Sell more products! Export grain to the world! Export the American way of life to everybody in the Third World! It ain't necessarily the same thing. Perhaps real economies of scale do not depend on getting bigger.

Let's look at one of my favorite sound bites: the subjective trumps the objective. Example: Back in 1965 I used to run my hogs so they would be easier to handle in the show ring. On the farm, I would just pick out one of my show animals and run her until she was tired enough that I could touch her. (I did this at twilight after chores, so she wouldn't be exhausted in the heat of the day.) Then I would pat her and scratch her ears and she really didn't have any choice but to tolerate it. This made her more used to me and other humans and easier to load into the truck and more maneuverable in the show ring. My reward was Reserve Champion gilt at the state fair and a higher price when I sold her for breeding stock. Another example: I sell fingerling potatoes at $3.00 per pound and regular potatoes for $1.50 per pound. My labor for growing fingerlings is only a little bit greater than for the larger normal potatoes, and really only in the washing and sorting. I do get more fingerlings per pound of seed planted and yield is comparable to regular potatoes, so the production costs for the two are roughly the same (I save my own seed potatoes, so seed cost is the same.) I can sell the fingerlings for twice what I get for regular potatoes because people love them. So do I and I even made my lefse the last two Christmases with fingerlings instead of regular potatoes. De var bare bra! (They were very good!) So, the subjective taste and cachet of the little fingerlings trumps the higher objective cost to the consumer per pound. Some of the more rigid academic types may quibble that I am misusing the term, but am I really? If we focus on utilization of what we have, rather than building something newer and bigger (or buying more acreage), we may find that we increase our efficiency through economies of scale. Another blogger on this site, Re Rustica, has touched on something similar that they call "efficiencies of small run production" and they made a good point. We don't have to keep increasing the size of our farms. Perhaps we can just be content to stay small and just get better at what we do.

February 12th is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. Whether or not we acknowledge it, farmers are using Darwinist agriculture every day. We look at our plants or our animals and select for characteristics that arose out of mutations and recombination at both the genetic and chromosomal level. Although we are using artificial selection mostly (i.e. selecting positively - best milker, best tomato, etc.), we also cull, a process of natural selection (i.e. selecting negatively - eating the chicken that doesn't lay eggs or the potato that is scabby). In point of fact, the origins of agriculture are most likely the result of random mutation influenced by human agency. Plant biologists estimate 25-50% of all plant species are polyploid (more than 2 sets of complete chromosomes). Many of the plants we grow for food are polyploids - oats, potatoes, bananas, peanuts, barley, plums, apples, sugarcane, coffee and wheat - also cotton. So . . . the likely scenario for wheat was: 1) Wild wheat is diploid, with 2 sets of 7 chromosomes for a diploid number of 14. 2) Natural hybridization (i.e. in the wild) and chromosomal doubling produced a mutation of tetraploid wild emmer wheats, with 4 sets of 7 chromosomes for a diploid number of 28. 3) Now the early farmers had a wheat they could work with. 4) Further mutations and human agency produced our modern wheat which is a hexaploid of 6 sets of 7 for a diploid number of 42.

The genius of Darwin was his impeccable argument that "something" is causing changes and those changes are having an effect on who reproduces. He didn't know that the "something" was random mutation, but also did not get discouraged and devolve into spiritualism, like Alfred Wallace. It took Gregor Mendel to put together the genetic basis of darwinism and Ronald Aylmer Fisher to unite the two into neo-darwinism. By the way, Fisher developed analysis of variance as a way to try and make some sense of the agricultural data at the Rothamsted Experimental Station. Now we are comfortable with randomness, natural selection and a long timeline for these two processes to work. However, in 1859 evolution by natural selection was a revolutionary idea.

Bread baking is more of a contact art than many people realize. You don't need to slavishly follow a recipe and you don't need to measure. Here are some mechanical instructions for basic whole wheat bread. With the economic downturn and the continued low prices for wheat, making your own bread is probably the most value-laden action you can take in the kitchen. First of all, use good ingredients. I use olive oil, whole wheat flour, sea salt, and dry yeast. A five pound bag of whole wheat flour is less than $5.00 in my local store and it will produce 4 big loaves. First thing is to take a handful of flour and put it in a bowl. Run the water in your sink until it is blood temperature, as measured on your wrist. Put enough lukewarm water into the flour until it is soupy. Stir it up and then add the yeast. Give it a quick stir, put a plate on top, and leave it on top of your refrigerator for a couple of hours or until it is frothy. When your yeast starter is ready, pour about half of the flour into a giant bowl, or even a clean pail. Add a couple shakes of salt and about a half cup of oil into the flour and mix with your hand or a big spoon. A couple of turns is all you need. The key here is to mix the dry ingredients together (except the yeast) and then add the oil to the dry ingredients. Now you add your yeast starter and then more lukewarm water (just pour some into your starter bowl to get the last bits of yeast and flour and then pour into the dry mixture). Stir the mix and keep adding lukewarm water until it mixes well and is the consistency of a thick batter. The key here is to mix the batter to develop gluten. This is most easily done at this stage when you can stir it rather than knead it. Some of the old recipes called for you to stir the batter a hundred times or more.

Now roll the mixture out onto a large cutting board or a clean counter. I use a cutting board because our kitchen counters are tile and the dough gets in the cracks. Start rolling the doughy mixture up and adding more dry flour until it has a nice dry feel. Also keep adding oil. If you flatten the dough out and drizzle the oil and then roll up the corners, it is easy to knead the oil out into the mixture. The key here is that you are working the dough by kneading and adding enough flour and oil to get the consistency you want. This develops the gluten again and you decide how much flour to keep adding, based on how the dough looks and feels. If you don't use up all your flour, you can keep it until next time or just add more water and oil to get the dough where you want it. By the second or third time you will be an expert at judging dough. For the first time, try getting it so it stretches easily and has a nice sheen.

Now wash out your big bowl and dry it. Add some oil and wipe it around the bowl with your fingers. Take your dough ball and place it in the oiled bowl and rub it around. Lift it up and turn it upside down. Now you have an oiled bowl with a nice round piece of oiled dough in it. Take a clean, damp towel and place it over the top of the bowl and place the whole thing somewhere it can rise for an hour or so. Most kitchens are warm enough that the top of the refrigerator is just right. I sometimes put it in the oven and turn the temp to warm if I am in a hurry or the house is too cold. You can also leave the dough to rise overnight, but this sometimes makes a crust on top. This is not a problem, though, as you will be working the dough soon enough.

When the dough has about doubled in bulk - remember this is 100% whole wheat so don't expect a light, fluffy rise - put it back on your lightly floured board or counter. Punch it down and knead it some more. The texture should be firm but have a silky feel. If it doesn't, don't worry - it will still be an excellent bread even if it is a bit flat. Now cut the dough into four loaves and roll each one out and knead a bit more. Roll up into loaves and place into oiled pans. You oil the pans the same way you did the bowl earlier and you also place the loaf in and turn it upside down so the top is oiled, just as you did earlier. You can push the loaves down a bit so they conform to the pans - it won't hurt the loaves. Let the bread rest until your oven warms up to 350 degrees and then put the loaves in. Set the timer for one hour. About halfway through the process, take a half cup of water and throw it on the floor of the oven. Close the oven door quickly as you are introducing steam into the oven to make the tops of the bread soft. You can even do this a second time if you like.

When your timer goes off, take one loaf out and shut the oven door quickly. Turn out the loaf and see if it has a satisfying "plunk" on the bottom when you tap it with your thumb and forefinger. If so, it is done. If not, give the bread another 10 minutes or so. Even if it is done, it won't hurt it to bake some more. Since this bread has no sugar, it doesn't burn very easily and is very forgiving on overbaking.

When your bread is done, turn all the loaves out on screens or a bunch of table knives. The key here is get air circulating all the way around the bread. Let the bread get almost cold before you bag it. This will make it moist in the bag. When I worked in a bakery, we used to bag the bread warm (not hot) and then leave it on racks with the ends of the bags open until it reached a critical temperature. Then we put on the twist ties. When your bread is bagged up, freeze three loaves and put the fourth in the refrigerator. At our house, 5 pounds of flour makes 4 loaves and that lasts the 2 of us for about a month. It takes very little time to make bread and it is an enjoyable pursuit. I have been making bread like this for over 30 years and it is just routine. Bread is more about the mechanics of texture and feel than about exactitude. That is why it is an art. Also, this is an art that can provide you with solid food on a daily basis for very little money. Bon appetit!

This morning on NPR, scientist and policy consultant Dan Sarewitz from Arizona State University addressed the political costs of global warming. He made a valid point that our use of energy is “the metabolism of modern industrial society.” Clearly, making energy more expensive puts a lot of strain on our society, and “changing that system is not about replacing a few technologies or advancing our level of efficiency along certain fronts." Nor was Sarewitz sanguine about the role of politicians in making real changes. (His office is in Washington, DC, so he is probably disenchanted with politicians because he deals with them every day.) His solution is to look back into history and see what worked. Okay, so far so good, and he had me agreeing with him – but then I heard the rest of the story.

Sarewitz, like so many other scientists who work in hierarchical academia, corporations and think tanks, is fond of top-down solutions. In his case, this means research and development and putting our energy into institutions. His example was the agriculture extension service, which was driven by land grant colleges and allied with farmers to put experimental methods into quick usage on the land. However, the point missing from Dr. Sarewitz’s view is that the Ag Extension Service is one of the culprits that got us into this mess in the first place.

Without the Ag Extension service, it is unlikely chemical companies would have had such a large impact on farming in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In addition, the whole trend towards agribusiness in the 1960’s was pushed by the Extension offices through schools, universities, testing offices, extension agents, 4-H, and FFA. “Get big or get out,” use stilbestrol implants in your cattle’s ears, depend on anhydrous ammonia instead of manure, plant fencerow to fencerow, buy bigger machinery, pulverize the soil, use more hybrids, use more antibiotics – these ideas were heavily promoted right along with plowing at right angles to the slope and production registry programs for hog production. I know this because I was there.

The real solution is to not depend on government for anything. Instead of top-down solutions where scientists get money from the government and big corporations – both with vested interests – we need bottom-up solutions. The real innovation is being done by small sustainable farmers who are trying new methods that use human labor (energy which is in plentiful supply) and making changes based on observation and results. Don’t get me wrong, being a scientist is not the problem. I am a scientist myself, but being a scientist is no safeguard against faulty solutions. I just read yesterday that some scientists in England want to sequester carbon by sinking post-harvest plant biomass into the ocean. In other words, instead of recapturing soil nutrients in corn stalks and other plant remains by decomposition, these scientists want to dump it into the oceans. I assume they also favor massive chemical inputs to restore soil fertility. It would not be surprising to me if this particular research has a money trail that leads back to chemical and petroleum companies.

The bottom line is simple. There are a whole bunch of us already working on REAL solutions to global warming and feeding the world. These solutions will require a lot of people to get off their duffs and actually sweat for a living. This is not a bad thing. The sooner we get to it the better.

This morning's paper notes the recall for peanut butter products is spreading. Now some products are being recalled because they were used on the same machinery that was used for potentially contaminated peanut butter. This may be overkill, as the machinery is presumably washed and sanitized between orders. However, adequate sanitation may not be a given, since the original company that created the problem sent their product out to be tested at a different lab after the first lab confirmed Salmonella contamination. In other words, we must consider that the industry might try to cover their tracks in order to avoid a loss of profits, so therefore we may not be able to trust the food products industry to maintain sanitary conditions in all cases . So what can we do, faced with a lack of confidence in producers of manufactured food products? Simply put, let's take a lesson from the E. coli outbreak in organic spinach that made so many people ill in 2006. At the time, there were no shortages of epidemiologists willing to point out that containment was nearly impossible when spinach was grown in California and marketed all the way to Wisconsin and  New York state. At the time, the main demographic "safety valve" had been breached. This safety valve is the small radius of distribution of food. If you have a virus or bacteria that is wreaking havoc on your plants, animals or even your family, you can contain it by not letting the carriers disperse. This is why quarantine is so effective. Physical barriers themselves are difficult to maintain. As an example, when a plague-ridden ship moored in the harbor in Bergen, Norway in July, 1349, it was not allowed to dock, but the rats escaped to land anyway. Within a year, not only had the plague devastated Bergen and the surrounding coastal areas, but also the interior land-locked valleys. Anyone who has been to Norway can appreciate the fact that it is mostly mountains. The fact that the plague was able to leap over immense natural physical barriers should give pause to anyone who thinks epidemics can be contained by physical barriers. Indeed, what makes an illness or health-related issue a pandemic (spread over a much wider area than an epidemic) has more to do with rate of incidence than an external constraint of affected space. [By the way, it is interesting to me that I was only able to trace my ancestors in Norway back to 1602, when a farmer came to a "deserted little farm." Populations in that inland area remained relatively stable and much reduced until the 1800's. Can we presume that this means it took Norway 450 years to recover from the plague? I think so.]

Now, if we eat most of our foods locally, we can minimize our exposure to food-borne diseases. Notice that I didn't say "control" or "prevent." Salmonella and E. coli are all around us, and there are going to be cases in our community. I myself got a good dose of Campylobacter from eating nachos in a local Ferndale restaurant in 2006 while watching the Argentina/Mexico World Cup game. The county health department suggested it was a case of cross-contamination. In my case, I was flat on my back for several days and missed work for almost a week, but it did not spread to surrounding areas. It was not a case of containment, but letting the problem run its course within a small area. In the peanut butter problem, while the food-born Salmonella outbreak is running its course, people in many states are affected. We can minimize this problem by acting as our own containment regulators. If we eat most of our food locally, we minimize the risk of food-born illnesses spreading beyond our local area. This is a case of public health being well-served by eating locally as much as possible.