F.A. Farm

Here is a link to yesterday's article in The New York Times on agro-imperialism. Unfortunately, this is a trend that is gathering steam. The lead example is Saudi Arabia, who had started a program of intensive wheat cultivation in their own country from 1980-1999, using tremendous amounts of irrigation. During that time they became the world's sixth-largest wheat exporter. However, when environmentalists suggested the Saudis were draining their underground aquifers at an unsustainable rate, they actually took heed (unlike the US for instance, which is still draining the Oglalla aquifer at unsustainable levels for wheat irrigation, from South Dakota to Texas). The Saudis new gamble is to buy/lease land in Africa and set up capital-intensive agriculture that is heavily dependent on irrigation, mechanized equipment, and chemical fertilizers (sound familiar?). Other countries are following suit, including China.

One problem the article does not mention is the historical climate/geographical pattern of Africa in relation to other areas of the world. Nearly the whole continent of Africa has been historically dependent on either herding or shifting cultivation (i.e. horticulture) rather than varying degrees of intensive cultivation (i.e. agriculture). One way to parse this is to think of the cultivation continuum, where horticulture stands at one end and is characterized by low-labor inputs on shifting plots. On the other end is agriculture, with high-labor inputs on permanent plots. Industrial agriculture substitues petroleum inputs for the high-labor inputs that formerly depended on slaves - hence petroleum as the "energy slave." This idea of a historical/climate/geographic pattern of shifting cultivation helps explain why the Green Revolution was applicable to Mexico, India, the Phillipines and other areas of the world, but not applicable to Africa.

The upshot is that Saudi Arabia and other countries are taking a big gamble in thinking that their massive amounts of capital can EASILY translate into more food. I think it is more likely they will fail AND since they are one of the principle buyers of American-made F-16's and other weaponry, they will end up destabilizing Africa. Then who will bail out the Saudis? Who do you think?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magazine/22land-t.html?_r=1&t...

I am quite fond of winter squash. This year I have Delicatas, Flame Buttercup (my own variety), Butternut, Dutch Crookneck, Blue Hubbard and Carnival. The Carnival seeds were given to me by a neighbor and they yielded spectacularly. The Blue Hubbard I grew out at another neighbor's, so I could keep the strain alive. I had gotten a buff-colored variant and I wanted to see if they would breed true. They didn't and my conclusion is they have more diversity in this seed line than I thought. The Delicatas, Carnival and Dutch Crookneck all produced at a rate of $30,000 per acre at the retail price of $1.50, $1.25 and $1.00 per pound respectively. All three produced at the calorie rate of 3-4 million kilocalories per acre, making them comparable to wheat in calorie density.

The Buttercups and Butternuts are not all in yet, but they are producing at the rate of $15,000 per acre. (I have the total square footage in my spreadsheet and so the figures are not "hard" until the whole harvest is in.) Their calorie value is around 2.3 million kilocalories per acre, again with only a partial harvest yield, but the total square footage alloted to the vegetable. I anticipate both the Buttercups and Butternuts will rise to the level of the other squashes once I have the harvest done and the final numbers in the spreadsheet. Since I am the only farmer on the place, there is always too much to do and the weather being so mild, I am leaving squash out in the field longer.

Here in modern America, we don't eat enough squash. I notice that the Local Harvest newsletter has a good recipe for Butternut Squash Soup in the newsletter that just came out today. This is a standard recipe and quite easy to prepare. We use a similar recipe all the time, but Toni and I mostly eat our squash baked. It is easy to pop into the oven at 350 degrees for an hour and a little bit of butter on top is all you need. (Forget the brown sugar - if the squash is mature it is sweet enough.) Squash, beans and potatoes are wonderful staple foods for the winter. Add a few root vegetables, sprouts and overwintered salad greens (including mustard) and a little meat for flavoring, and you can eat cheaply all winter long.

Back when I was coaching soccer, I taught my players to think in terms of time vs. space. For example, when the attacker is coming downfield with the ball, he (or she) has the advantage in timing because he (or she) is initiating each move. The defender will always be slower by at least a fraction of a second. If the attacker is also a good ball-handler, this becomes a distinct advantage. The primary job of the first defender must then be delay - giving up a little space but keeping the pressure on until the 2nd and 3rd defenders arrive on the scene. [BTW, notice the subtext here of splitting up the fields into discreet units with actors in each scene.] In essence, you can control time by controlling space. The inverse is true. You can control the space downfield if you slot a timing pass into space and your 2nd or 3rd attacker arrives on the scene the same time as the ball does. You can also create space (and problems) downfield by sending your 3rd attacker out wide to spread the defense - hence the concept of 3rd man running. The point is that you can control space by controlling time and control time by controlling space. It is a constant interplay, a push and pull that moves down the field in a flowing pattern that constitutes the beautiful game.

Yesterday, I had a discussion about permaculture with a colleague and it gravitated into evolutionary biology. We were discussing natural selection vs. artificial selection. I made the point about natural selection being essentially negative selection, while artificial selection is positive selection. [Yes, all you academic types can comment on my simplistic analysis if you wish. You can even take issue with my concept of the individual organism being the locus of evolution if you so desire.] For example, the wolves hang around the elk herd and observe which ones are a little slower, or limping, or a little spaced-out at the moment. Then they make one or two choices and see which ones respond. The result is dinner - about 20% of the time or less - wolves are far from perfect. This is natural selection, where individual organisms are selected against by something in the environment. The wolves don't shout out to the buff elk, "Hey Harry, you're looking pretty fit today! We won't mess with you!" Nor do the cows hear this positive affirmation and decide that Harry can suddenly buy them drinks and dinner. What happens is that the unfit specimens get eaten before they can pass on their genes in a significant amount in the gene pool. Over time, the fitter genes increase in frequency in the population. This is evolution by natural selection.

In artificial selection, the farmer picks out the best cattle (or corn or tomatoes or something else) that serves his (or her) purpose. The farmer then makes a selection which ones get to breed and which do not. This is positive selection, where individual organisms are selected for by something in the environment. Over time, the selected-for genes (not necessarily the fittest genes!) rise in frequency in the population. This is evolution by artificial selection. Notice that we already have a problem with fitness in the overall environment. What the farmer is selecting for may not necessarily be viable.

Now, since genetic differences come largely from mutations in DNA, selecting against a small number of individuals allows for a large amount of genetic variation to exist in the gene pool. If a gene pool consists of variants A, B, C, D, E, etc. and only A is selected against, B, C, D and E still exist in the gene pool and gene D may continue to reside in the gene pool, even though it confers no fitness. It is just a mutation that has not been subject to environmental testing. Most biologists are guilty of using the term "selected for" in their writing, but this is usually just imprecision in language. It is similar to talking about hypothesis testing, where the correct answer may be, "We cannot reject the null hypothesis," but the writer/lecturer may actually say, "We accept the null hypothesis." The imprecision is along the lines of President Bush saying, "Either you are with us in the war on terror, or you're against us." Of course, this was fatuous nonsense, since many countries were not with the US, but still did not support terrorism. In the same manner, selecting against one organism and its set of genes does not select for another organism and its set of genes.

If we think of these genetic differences lying about in the gene pool and not being subject to selection, we can think of them taking up "genetic space." Sometimes the term used is "junk" DNA. In the soccer analogy, these genes are controlling space and we can control them by timing. How do we do this? It really is quite simple. We select for traits we want. Anyone can see that stock breeding has achieved massive changes in dairy and beef cattle in the last 50 years. We can also see massive changes in plant varieties in the last few years also, as corporations, university research stations, and even small farmers extend their control over the livestock and plants they grow. They have shortened the time element of evolution by artificial selection. The result is that the "genetic space" is controlled and is even now being circumscribed. This is not to say differential mutations will not arise. Of course they will, as they are essentially random. However, we might want to think about our control of genetic space as we produce fewer and fewer varieties of crops.

Most people don't really grasp the magnitude of the peak oil problem as it relates to agriculture. Ever since the 1950's, there have been plenty of adverts extolling all the things that are made with petroleum products - from nylons to Nintendos. In the last few years, many people have started connecting the ubiquity of petroleum in our daily life to the food we eat. Without petroleum, there is no industrial agriculture and our ability to feed 6.8 billion people is compromised. Even now, we cannot feed everyone. The Green Revolution was heavily dependent on cheap fossil fuels; the increased levels of pesticides, artificial fertilizers, and research and development on high-yielding grains were all dependent on increasing use of cheap petroleum and its byproducts. Now, the increased population fostered by the Green Revolution has amped up the problem by several levels in India, Mexico and Asia. Yet the world supply of petroleum is decreasing and the price of a barrel of oil is steadily increasing. There are short-term price reductions, of course, but the overall price momentum continues to go up. These are all trends we can read about every day, but the sheer volume of info and the inability to put the problem in a local framework predisposes ordinary humans to just dismiss it. Here is a simple way to put the problem in perspective.

This year, I have produced enough calories on 1.5 acres to provide food for 3.54 people. This is based on 3.23 million calories produced from 77 crops and a calorie need of 2500 calories per person over 365 days (3,230,725 ÷ 365 ÷ 2500 = 3.54). To produce this food, I used 1.06 million calories (3000 hours of my labor at 125 calories per hour + 22.25 gallons of tiller gasoline at 31,000 calories per gallon = 1,064,750 calories). This gives me an efficiency ratio of 3.03 (3.23 million calories output ÷ 1.06 million calories input = 3.03). Now, these are interesting numbers, but how do they compare to the energy usage of a normal American driving 12,500 miles in a year with their car/truck at 25 miles per gallon? We can easily calculate this as 500 gallons of gas used per year and at 31,000 calories per gallon, the average American uses 15.5 million calories of gasoline - just to drive around. This means that the average driver uses over 15 times as much energy in their personal transportation use as I do for growing food to feed 3.5 people.

Obviously, the magnitude of the peak oil problem has more to do with personal transportation than with agriculture use. In point of fact, as we wind down our energy usage, it may become public policy to shift more of available fossil fuels to farmers to continue to feed people, while simultaneously restricting personal automobile use. This would certainly benefit everyone and would also keep industrial agriculture going for several more years. So why develop a sustainable model right now, when it would obviously be to my advantage to grow food through use of tractors on larger acreage? There are several reasons to abstain from the current industrial model.
1) I don't have access to enough land to grow food at the level of industrial agriculture.
2) I don't have enough capital to buy equipment, seed, fertilizer, etc at the industrial level. Nor do I have access to capital.
3) Industrial farming does not provide the same high-quality food I grow now, even from corporate organic farms. As any of you who have purchased so-called "organic" produce at the supermarket and compared it to my produce, my stuff wins hands down.
4) I am getting older and spending 14 hours on a tractor at a time does not sit well with my body.
5) The industrial ag game is rigged against family farmers - just ask any farmer in your own neighborhood.
6) Business plans are based on the future and the future is extremely dicey. Getting involved in a 5-year expansion based on current markets is just foolish.

A better model for solving current agriculture problems is to forget about being a "farmer." The real problem is growing food that is good to eat. Once you start thinking in this manner, a lot of alternatives are available but the main paradigm shift is to think about bridging the gap, or "transitioning" between the modern industrial agriculture model and the postmodern human-scale food production model. So what we need now are ways to grow food that meets our needs now, while simultaneously working towards a sustainable future. That's what I am doing. Even though I work with it every day, the magnitude of the problem is still a mind-blower.

Many years ago I applied for a breakfast cook job at a hotel in Boulder, Colorado. The application process included a question along the lines of: "You have three orders come in for the same table. One is 2 eggs over with ham and whole wheat toast; the second is Eggs Benedict and the third is a Spanish omelette with a side of pancakes. Write down the step-by-step process you would follow in finishing all three orders at the same time." For those of you who have been line cooks, you could probably do this order in your sleep, as could I, and I always liked this kind of application question.

I remembered that question this morning as I made myself an omelette and I thought at some length about timing in cooking. Sometimes I do all my prep work ahead of time and leave the ingredients in little bowls that I add at the right time. However, I find this boring, as I have to stand around and wait for the right time to add the ingredients. I much prefer to do my prepping as I cook and I sometimes refer to this as "just-in-time prep work." Back when I was an office temp I used to learn each new program I had to use by going to the tutorial in the Help Menu in the program itself. I called this approach "just-in-time learning." I first got onto the "just-in-time" concept when I worked in a machine shop and the owner had adopted the idea from Japanese business. Now many people have used this idea in their businesses and there is even a backlash against the concept because it is heavily dependent on cheap oil for transportation and it tends to clog up city streets during the workday hours (as it has done in Tokyo for years). Now American business is rethinking the idea of warehousing, especially if it can take advantage of inflationary cycles. In short, timing itself is being analyzed.

"Timing is everything," is an oft-used soundbite. Just as in cooking, timing is important in farming. For example, getting new potatoes out of the ground ahead of the lifecycle of late blight provides a backup against losing the entire crop. Using soaker hose or drip tape to water tomatoes not only lessens the probability of late blight, but also affords the opportunity to short the plants on water and speed up ripening. It is difficult not to hit the tomatoes if you have an impact sprinkler system, as I do, with a specified number of watering stations and a 10-day cycle - here's that timing thing again. The point is that timing is important in crop cycles and in individual plant cycles. This is not a new concept.

However, let's look at timing in a wider context. For the last 40 years I have been waiting for something to happen to afford the opportunity for real change. There was quite a burst of social change during the 60's and a lot of follow-through in the 70's. However, mainstream society fought back against real change and many cosmetic changes took the place of real change. One of the things Toni and I marvel at his how little progress has been made since our back-to-the-lander days. If we could have known how stratified and repressive American society would become, we wouldn't have believed it. The upshot of this perception is that the timing wasn't right in 1969. Of course, the question now becomes, "Is the timing right in 2009?" Tentatively, I think so.

The Transition Movement is gaining some traction right here in Whatcom county and around the nation. There are quite a few flaws, as it is mostly repackaging progressive social tactics developed over the last 40 years into a slick, branded package and marketing them heavily as new ideas. However, if it sweeps up the disaffected and airy-fairy and touchy-feely types into a movement that actually gets down into the dirt and sweats calories, it will have done its job. Right now the Transition Movement is mostly about meetings and spreading the word. However, it has provided another forum for me to spread my ideas and the local Transition Whatcom site provides constant updates from The Energy Bulletin and other worthy peak oil sources. I do take issue with its permaculture roots (there is way too much "cult" in permaculture) and since I have discussed my take on permaculture in other posts, I won't repeat myself. I also take issue with the whole idea of branding. As David Bowie once said, "Product plus personality equals brand." This is quite accurate and one only needs to look at Bowie's career to see how he marketed himself into superstardom. Personally, I find the whole concept of branding disgusting and Naomi Klein's book on corporate branding, No Logo (2000), was quite an eye-opener.

Clearly, I am selling my story when I am fresh-picking and selling vegetables to customers on the farm, but I am not doing the same thing as Nike (one of Klein's examples) is doing with their branding. Nike sells the brand and outsources the product. It doesn't really matter if its shoes are made in the Phillipines or Vietnam - the brand is what the customer is buying. The place means nothing and the product very little. It is all about the image behind the brand. In certified organics, the brand is once again most important. It doesn't matter where the product was made and the product is less important than the image being sold. In a nutshell, that is what then-Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman was saying back in 2000 when he said organic certification is not about food safety but just about marketing.

There are different levels to marketing. I do some marketing and I sell my commitment to the land every time I tell my story to a customer. However, I don't do branding like those who use the certified organic brand. The place I grow my food is important and the product itself is of prime importance, not whether it has a certified organic label. As an example of how the certified organic brand has gone astray, the Bellingham Co-op doesn't care whether their produce is grown in California or in Northwest Washington. What is most important to them is whether the produce has the certified organic brand.

How does all this relate to timing? I think the time is right for real change - right now. It starts with the land and proceeds through the food into the time spent cooking our own meals with like-minded folks. However, I think we have to be careful this time around. We cannot let ourselves be co-opted this time, especially by retread corporate tactics like branding and slick promotion. The environmental stakes are much higher and the societal costs more expensive.

A friend of mine suggested I read The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (1996) by David Hackett Fischer, a historian who teaches at Brandeis University. Fischer has done quite a good job of parsing out demographic waves (hence the title) using price data and he is comfortable with the anthropological view of culture. A couple of years ago, I made the comment at a meeting that "Culture trumps economics - look at the growth of the organic movement in the last 40 years," and the three economics professors on the panel and in the audience became quite irate. Besides being thin-skinned, these highly-paid professionals didn't seem to understand that I was talking about household economics rather than slamming their discipline. Fischer, on the other hand, has no ox to gore and is quite abstemious in presenting his own theory of causal explanation for the price waves he describes.

In a nutshell, Fischer describes four great demographic waves using deep change in price movements over the last 800 years. By necessity, the data is more readily available for Europe and the western world, but there is a certain Eurocentrism prevalent in this type of exercise. I don't see it as much of a problem, however, since the expansion of colonization into the New World was driven by European naval powers and Fischer does bring in some of the Asian influences whenever he can. The first wave started with harvest fluctuations and famine in the 13th century, which put quite a bit of stress on individuals and societies even before the Black Death hit in the mid-14th century. This resulted in a crash in population and a later equilibrium which resulted in the Renaissance. The second wave was the crisis of the 17th century, which began with population increase and price instability in the late 15th century. The second crash in population paved the way for the second equilibrium of the Enlightenment. It should be noted that by the time of this second wave, the New World was now producing staple commodities for Europe, so this served as a buffer, of sorts, against demographic volatility in Europe. However, this "buffer" also engendered its own problems, especially as the American colonies acted upon Enlightenment ideals. Nevertheless the third wave started again with the demographics of overpopulation and high grain prices. The inevitable revolutionary crisis of the mid-to-late 18th century in America, France and the rest of Europe reached its culmination in the Napoleonic Wars and ended at Waterloo. This time, however, the nations of Europe were more savvy in preventing social violence through standing armies, state police forces and some social welfare. This provided enough sustenance to keep the poor hungry, but not riotous. The next equilibrium was the Victorian, named after Queen Victoria and roughly coincident with her reign.

The Victorian Equilibrium saw the rise, once again, of population and prices, and this led to our own fourth wave. Now we have a huge population that is at a crisis point. Fischer does not hazard a guess as to the new equilibrium or even whether it is inevitable, but he does provide some models for understanding the four great waves. He describes seven causal models extant in the historical literature - monetarist, Malthusian, Marxist, agrarian, neoclassical, environmental, and historicist - and proceeds to demolish each one. Fischer then goes on to suggest a model of autogenous change. This model builds on culture as a complex web of causal relationships and history as a sequence of contingencies. Contingency and choice are vital elements - people make choices based on what is available. To be blunt, "Culture trumps economics." Optimization and optimal foraging concepts (I am hunting rabbits but if I see a deer, I will always go for the deer.) do not apply. People decide to have more children and they change the way they make economic decisions. The result is that aggregate demand grows faster than supply, thus increasing prices. This is a valid model, but Fischer has missed something important.

Fischer's book was published in 1996, before peak oil and climate change had reached a wide audience. Nowhere in his book does he talk about the impact of coal or petroleum as providing new energy "slaves" that increased production and allowed humans to increase their population. Nowhere does he talk about population overshoot as a lagging effect on demand. One can certainly factor in the role of coal in the Industrial Revolution and the surplus energy of cheap oil in allowing populations to continue to increase after a wave "breaks." If you do so, one causal model of Fischer's seven models rises to the top once again - the Malthusian model. This model, from Thomas Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), states that societal improvement results in population growth, which then results in population crashes, since "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." Fischer's criticism of the Malthusian model is that it works fine for the first two waves, but not the third and fourth. However, if you factor in the rise of coal as an energy slave that powers the Industrial Revolution from 1750 to 1850, we can postulate that increasing productivity mitigated the effects of the crash of the third wave in the early 1800's. In other words, a cheap energy source allowed more population and a continuation of the underlying population increase between the crash of the third wave and the Victorian Equilibrium. In the fourth wave, petroleum has allowed populations to increase beyond all former limits and even beyond the carrying capacity of the earth. The upshot is that Malthus' model would have worked with the third wave, if not for the intercession of the energy slave of coal keeping productivity up high enough so European populations had enough to eat. The same holds for the fourth wave, but the energy slave is cheap oil and this has allowed even higher levels of population in a time of increasing prices. Thus, the Malthusian model is just "put on hold" until the coal was replaced by oil (third wave) and until the cheap oil runs out (fourth wave). Notice that coal didn't run out, but was replaced by cheap oil. Nor will cheap oil run out, as some so blithely suggest. Peak oil is based on energy return on investment (EROI), which simply means that it costs energy to extract energy. Right now, cheap oil is still returning at a rate of at least 5:1 calories returned for calories to get it out of the ground, refined, and to market. I say at least because some sources still use a ratio of 20:1, but 5:1 is still economical to power modern societies. The end of oil as a fuel will come when it is uneconomical to use it, in a real thermal energy sense, not just by price.

The bottom line is that Fischer's book provides a theoretical model for describing some of the demographic events of the past 800 years, but it is dated. The concept of autogenous change is quite good and deserves further analysis. I recommend this book highly, and it is not as dry as you might think. You should note that the book is only 258 pages itself, but also features another 250 pages of notes and appendices. I rather liked that.

There was an interesting article in Friday's New York Times on Sweden's latest efforts to quantify emissions. Since an estimated 25% of industrialized nations' carbon emissions can be traced to the food they eat (not only production, but transportation, marketing, cooking, etc.), Lantmannen, Sweden's largest farming organization, decided to label greenhouse gas emissions of food.

The labels take into account variation on where the food is grown (for example carrots can vary by a factor of 10), whether a farmer grows his/her own cattlefeed, whether peat has been plowed up (releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide), and a host of other issues. In short, it is comprehensive and very similar to my demand of the local environmental economists for "a metric that crosses all platforms." I favor kilocalories, which are translatable into joules, KWH, and BTUs. The Swedes are using kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents. Not to be outdone, KRAV, Scandinavia's main organic certification program, has announced that next year farmers will have to convert to low-emissions programs to keep their certification. This means most greenhouse tomatoes in Scandinavia will no longer be labeled organic, since greenhouses are such energy hogs. This is something most US organic growers are not considering in their own tomato production.

Sweden is a small country, with a largely homogenous population. Sweden has a long history of dealing with Russia/USSR during the Cold War, while simultaneously having most of its links with the US and the EU. It is also mostly unburdened by religion and the government actually listens to its people. Thus, conditions are favorable for programs to lower its carbon emissions. In the US, the game is quite different and there really is no hope of getting something like this program going anytime in the near future. Once again, us little people have to do it ourselves and on a local level first. Here is the article for your examination.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/world/europe/23degrees.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Last Sunday at a seed swap event, I got a new angle on squash and pumpkin seeds. I eat them all the time and I usually toast them with salt and chili powder. Whenever I bake a squash, I clean the seeds and put them on a baking pan on a shelf directly under the baking squash sections. They only need half an hour or so. The new angle on squash is they are also a good protein source for vegans. I'm not a vegan, but a couple of my customers are, so I am always looking for vegan tips. Here's a list of some sources of protein, calcium and iron for vegans. The source is http://yourtotalhealth.ivillage.com/diet-fitness/stocking-vegans-pantry.html

Vegan sources of protein:

• Brewer's yeast
• Nuts
• Nut butters
• Soy products, especially TVP, tofu, soy nuts, soy milk and baked goods made with soy flour
• Pumpkin and squash seeds
• Legumes
• Whole grains, especially quinoa, spelt and brown rice

Vegan sources of calcium:

• Almonds
• Filberts
• Kale
• Collards
• Tofu
• Broccoli
• Bok choi
• Turnip greens
• Okra

Vegan sources of iron:

• Cooking in iron skillets
• Brewer's yeast
• Pumpkin and squash seeds
• Blackstrap molasses
• Soybeans
• Wheat germ
• Pine nuts
• Dried lima beans
• Potatoes with their skin on
• Dried raisins, prunes, apricots

Vegan sources of vitamin B12:

• Fortified cereal and beverages

Snacks that make good and tasty use of these foods include:

• Trail mix made with fortified cereal, pumpkin seeds, raisin and peanuts
• Muffins made with wheat germ, soy flour and sweetened with molasses (only use a little, as blackstrap is a strong and bitter molasses that may overpower the muffin if used in excess)
• Tofu cubes

Squash is quite easy to grow, as you can dig out a hill to plant them every six feet and space your rows six feet apart. You can even just slot them into your landscaping wherever you have some room and you don't mind the vines. You don't have to till if you don't want, but you do have to control the grass. If you like, you can cover the ground with heavy mulch until the vines grow up enough to crawl all over and take over your mulching duties for you. It is good to keep a 18-inch circle bare until the plants are up, to make sure the ground is warm. This is not hard to weed by hand. Around here (NW Washington) we can direct seed both summer and winter squash around mid-May. Some people with greenhouses start squash inside to get an extra jump on the weather. I don't bother. My favorite squash is Buttercup and I have my own variety, which resulted from a favorable mutation I discovered several years ago. It has orange flames that lick up the side of the dark green background. It is quite striking and I call it Flame Buttercup. I also grow Butternut, which I like in soups, and Hubbard, which I think has the best seeds of the squashes I have tried. Pumpkin seeds are even better and some pumpkins are grown just for their seeds. I think that's a good idea. Since summer squash (including zucchini) are Cucurbita pepo, like pie pumpkins, you could grow them out to maturity and eat their seeds too. Carving pumpkins are usually Cucurbita maxima, but you could certainly eat their seeds too. You have to be careful of crossing between varieties of the same species, so isolation of a quarter mile is preferred, but you could certainly plant C. maxima in with C. pepo. As I have mentioned before, squash was one of the earliest domesticates, for good reasons. Growing them as a seed source is another of their beneficial aspects.

Recently I posted an intentional slogan/soundbite on the Transition Whatcom site. It started with "Diversity, diversity, diversity" and went on to list a few new crops we might want to try up here in the Fourth Corner - okra, figs, etc. The post ended with the same slogan/soundbite/catch phrase, "Diversity, diversity, diversity. [The Transition Whatcom site is proving to be a valuable tool. If you are interested, the link to the main page is: http://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/.]

Back in the 60's and early 70's, slogans and cliches were important - Make Love Not War, Free Angela, End the War Now, Every Soldier is a Prisoner of War, etc. Coupled with a can of spray paint, it was a way to let other "heads" know there were more of us around and to remind everyone else that antiauthoritarianism was still alive and well, even though it had been driven underground by Nixon's thugs and his supporters in local police departments. Today the constant battle for "hearts and minds" (Remember that one?) still goes on but many people are so numbed by the soundbite culture of TV that everything washes over them. The sloganeering of the 60's itself contributed to the soundbite culture, simply because it was effective. Now soundbites are a main component of what passes for news and even common discourse. Those of us outside the mainstream still use them, although we use different media nowadays to get our message across. The principle remains the same.

I use soundbites myself. Trying to limit myself to easily digestible sentences helps tighten up my writing. It is similar to Hemingway's dictum, "First, write a simple true sentence; then write another one." [Disclaimer: The actual quote is, "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know. So finally, I would write a true sentence and go on from there. It was a wonderful feeling when I had worked well."] So, since we are stuck in the soundbite culture, let's try and make it interesting. Perhaps a "diversity" of soundbites.

To crib an idea from the realtors (location, location, location), we need "diversity, diversity, diversity" to counter the climate volatility that is part and parcel of global warming/climate change. It is unlikely the Obama administration will actually show leadership on climate change at Copenhagen in December, and many people are starting to see this summit as a watershed event. By January, it should be clear the responsibility is up to all of us. We will just have to mitigate the effects as well as we can. In the field, diversity in crops helps mitigate climate swings and local weather blips. If my green beans are no good this year, perhaps my tomatoes will have a bumper crop and take up the slack. If I cannot grow wheat this year, perhaps my triticale will give me enough grain to get by on flatbread and quasi-vollkorn loaves until next year.

Back in my undergraduate years, I heard a good comment from one of my instructors about eugenics; "If you try to improve the species by getting rid of the unfit individuals, you lose the inherent diversity they bring to the gene pool." Concise, compact, coherent. The analogy to our monocropping mania should be apparent. If you try to grow miles and miles of corn by getting rid of all the weeds and insects, you lose the inherent diversity that keeps natural predators and symbiots onsite and doing their job. I try to crush the GMO arguments with a similar argument, "Genetically-modified organisms have not been put under phenotypic pressure. They are dangerous because they have not been subjected to natural selection."

Of course, using soundbites always runs the risk of being misunderstood. However, consider their lesser ability to be taken out of context. The essence of soundbite is that it is largely self-contained. We can use this to our advantage.

Most direct marketers are aware of the importance of niche creation. As farmers or artisans, we don't need to sell to everybody, like the supermarkets. We can survive by selling to a select few. Where the disagreement and confusion comes in seems to be how wide the niche needs to be. In my situation, I only need 60 loyal customers/shareholders to make a living. Other sustainable farmers think they need a large, undefinable number of customers and this naturally leads to tactics like third party organic certification, expanding markets to the Seattle area (100 miles away), and three days a week at farmers markets. But the flaw in these marketing ideas is not quantifying how many customers you actually need. You don't have to sell to everybody and you can survive by actually narrowing the niche to your most loyal customers/shareholders/associates/comrades/what-have-you. I would rather have fewer customers who actually understand simple food grown sustainably from soil that is well-cared-for.

For another aspect of niche creation, let's look at the New York Times Book Review of Peter Richardson's new book on Ramparts Magazine, A Bomb in Every Issue, just published by the New York Press. Here is the penultimate paragraph in the review.

Although Ramparts continued to break important stories that the establishment press ignored, the magazine didn't glisten after Hinckle the impresario left. Richardson attibutes the decline to a number of causes. Like all niche-creating magazines, Ramparts attracted competition that wound up stealing readers; at the same time, it abandoned part of its audience by embracing New Left orthododoxy, which "rejected anything short of revolution." The magazine also ran out of liberal millionaire donors. Its accrued losses must have run into the tens of millions, making it unlike pantheon magazines that made money.

Notice the sentence, "Like all niche-creating magazines, Ramparts attracted competition that wound up stealing readers . . ." We can see this same worry in the rise of niche protection in organic/sustainable agriculture. As an example, when we moved the Ferndale Farmers Market onto the Riverwalk in downtown Ferndale in 2008, one of the members of the board of the Bellingham Farmers Market asked us to open Sundays instead of Saturdays, so we wouldn't compete with them. Personally, I thought this was ludicrous, since we were so much smaller and not a real threat to them. Another example is that of another organic farmer in Whatcom County, who started using "Startlingly Fresh" in his marketing literature a year after I started my tag line of "Fresh, Absolutely!"

Now, both of these examples are tempests in teapots. It didn't really hurt the Bellingham Farmers Market to have competition, simply because direct-marketed, organic/sustainable produce is less than 1% of what people buy in Whatcom County. By the same token, copying my tag line concept doesn't hurt me either, since our produce is such a miniscule percentage of what people buy. Our task is really to create more niches. One could say that we are broadening the "organic/sustainable" niche, but we really do have a multiplicity of niches. I cater to the more politically active, while the unnamed farmer above caters to the warm & fuzzy co-op crowd. In other words, let's broaden our number of niches, rather than broadening a large generalized niche that we call "organic" and "sustainable." An added bonus to this specificity will be that the big brouhaha over certified organic will just naturally fall away. Put another way, by narrowing our niche to a few valued customers, they will of course be local and the local, community-building aspects of direct marketing will naturally fall into place, WITHOUT giving Washington state and the USDA their pound of flesh.

Finally, Ramparts did indeed have a hand in its own demise, which the author attributes to the magazine embracing "New Left orthodoxy." The emphasis on "New Left orthodoxy" is ridiculous of course, as the real trend of the 60's reached its conclusion in a synthesis of the hip & radical and culminated in co-ops, back-to-the-landers, the environmental movement and an enhanced feminist movement. Since I was there, I can state with some experience that the "New Left orthodoxy" was honored in the breach more than in fact. Bespectacled potty-mouthed Marxists in their ratty outfits were still around, but once they had to actually burn a few calories to stock shelves or hoe carrots, they soon left for university positions teaching political science. The real reason for Ramparts' demise was the departure of Warren Hinckle, although their business model of extracting guilt money from liberal donors was only viable when the economy was flush. After Nixon wrecked the economy, the funding from liberal patrons dried up. Ramparts did indeed serve a useful role in the journalism of the 60's (the real journalism, as typified by the underground newspapers I used to sell), but it was an artifact of the era. It may have some lessons for us still, but we really need to think creatively ourselves and solve our problems today, right now, pronto. One way to go about this is to think about niche marketing in a more creative, sophisticated manner.

As promised in my last post, I will give you my take on Paul Roberts' article in Mother Jones. It was titled "Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008," and was published in March 2, 2009. Here is your online link. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008

This is an important article for several reasons. Paul Roberts is a well-respected author, whose previous books, The End of Oil (2005) and The End of Food (2008), have influenced many people and given him a high profile in the peak oil and sustainability debates. I have only read The End of Food, but it was quite good in pointing out how farmers have to grow 2-3 times more food than needed in order to have the "perfect" produce retailers and restaurateurs have come to expect from the industrial agribusiness distribution system. Of course, the "less than perfect" produce sells at commodity prices and requires secondary markets that focus on value-added products. Thus, even if you get $3.00 per pound for some of your tomatoes to a high-end restaurant, most of your tomatoes may go for 35 cents a pound to a sauce company. This also assumes you actually have these secondary outlets, which have declined in number over the years. For example, Ferndale used to have a Simplot carrot processing facility but it is long gone and the Bellingham food processors are all gone too. Thus, the secondary markets are donations to the food banks and the resultant tax breaks - a pitiful substitute for anyone actually wanting to make a living on the farm. The upshot is that Roberts extends the logic of his investigations to show you some of the results that are not readily apparent.

In the Mother Jones article, however, he only implies what the end point is. This is unfortunate, as he seems to realize he will eventually end up supporting Monsanto and BP in their greenwashing. In his article, he starts out presenting an eastern Washington farmer, Fred Fleming, who is using no-till methods to grow wheat and stop erosion, which has become a real problem in eastern Washington. Unfortunately, no-till requires a lot of herbicides, since the lack of mechanical cultivation encourages weeds. This, of course, engenders no respect from what Roberts calls "the alternative food crowd" and Roberts next asks the question, "What should replace the bad old industrial system?" So far, Roberts is right on target. He delineates the problem, presents one alternative and focuses in on the crux of the matter. However, his next steps in his argument fall under the broad banner of spin and this is where he and I disagree.

Roberts is correct in stating that, "We're going to need not only new methods for producing food, but a whole new set of assumptions about what sustainability really means." However, he falls into the realm of spin when he focuses on food miles and repeats the tired old argument that it is more efficient in energy usage to get produce on a semi from California, rather than from a local farmer. I have addressed this issue with all the calorie numbers necessary in other blog posts, so I will only state a quick recap. My produce has a calorie load of 17 calories per pound if I go to the Ferndale Farmers Market and 62 calories per pound if I go to the Bellingham Farmers Market. The calorie load for the average produce that travels 1500 miles on a semi is 263 calories per pound. Now if I were to truck produce down to Seattle (100 miles away), I would have 620 calories per pound because of the size of my pickup and this would indeed be more than the calorie load from the semi-hauled produce. Thus, there will be an actual mileage point at which the local produce ceases being efficient. This is FAR, FAR different from a blanket statement that locally produced and transported produce is not efficient. This tired old argument (Or should I say tired NEW argument?) also ignores the transport calories required to get the produce to the central distribution point where it is packed and loaded onto trucks, something that is included in the local farmers market calorie calculation. In short, Roberts sets up a straw man and proceeds to demolish it.

Roberts makes other arguments in the article which also seem cogent, but are revealed as unworthy once you deconstruct them. For example, his assertion that, "The local-food movement, too, must learn to bend. The reality of 21st-century America is that food demand is centered in cities, while most arable land is in rural areas." This is a valid introductory salvo, but it does not necessarily lead to specialization of food products on rural lands far removed from the cities themselves, as Roberts maintains. This specialization is part of the current structure of modern agriculture that has gotten us into this problem and it is still heavily dependent on cheap oil. Roberts' alternative of "much larger geographic systems," while still smaller than the globalization model of mid-winter raspberries from Chile, for example, still runs into the same difficulties of excessive amounts of energy used in transport of specialized moncultures produced far away from the cities themselves. In other words, Roberts is advocating for a smaller version of the same old cheap oil model. Right now our food is distributed via fossil fuels that are still cheap and the distinctions are merely stopping points on the same continuum. Raspberries from Chile use more energy to get to us than produce trucked from California, which uses more energy than pears grown in Hood River, Oregon, and shipped to Portland. However, pears or raspberries grown right in Multnomah County (the county where Portland is situated) will still have a smaller energy footprint than those grown in Hood River. [Disclaimer: I picked pears in Hood River when I was a migrant worker, so I have some knowledge of this industry.] As I said in the previous paragraph, you can measure the energy load, whether you use calories (actually kilocalories - a blip that is from the nutritionists and will probably be with us forever) or kilowatt hours (KWH) or British thermal units (BTU) or joules, all of which are mathematically interchangeable. Once you calculate the energy load you will arrive at a quantitative assessment. Making assertions without quantification is just another form of spin based on your credibility as an author and Roberts really should know better.

Another difficulty is that Roberts assumes the locavore model is mature (which it isn't) and that it actually has a significant impact on food distribution (which it doesn't). Currently, local food feeds between 1-4% of people across the US (depending on your source - Roberts says 2%) and in statistical terms, is only as significant as a Type I error due to randomness. In other words, the locavore movement is more important for educational and propaganda purposes than in actual food delivered. Setting it up as a straw man that "must learn to bend" is disingenuous.

Okay, bottom line time. Is Roberts' article worth a quick read? Yes. Is it worth a close read? Yes. However, is he poised on a "slippery slope,"  to use his own words? Yes. Does this slippery slope lead to more of the same - subsidies, monoculture, specialization of human endeavor, disassociation of city and country, and net profits for farmers so low that no one in their right mind would go into farming? Yes. Have Monsanto and BP already staked out their claim to this "new" territory? Yes. Does Roberts actually propose viable alternatives? NO.

Here's an alternative. You must reach down into your pockets and pay sustainable farmers a fair price for the food they grow with low fossil fuel inputs. You must do your own marketing and devise more alternative forms of transport. This will leave the farmer more time to farm. Once the farmer can make a living, there will be plenty of starry-eyed young newbies who will continue past their first year or even six-month efforts. While you are doing this, you should till up your lawns and grow food. Eventually, we will get to the point where 75% of a city's food comes from within 25-50 miles of the city (my personal measurement of local). At this point we should have achieved the 20% Solution. As I have maintained for some time now, there is no real solution to the peak oil/climate change crisis without 20% of the adult population working as full-time farmers. Many people disagree with me on this. Paul Roberts thinks that sustainability needs a modification of our current system, with smarter management. I don't buy it. Do you?

On September 21, 2009, the Seattle Times published an article titled, "Northwest Farmers Band Together to Market Their Own Flour" by Melissa Allison. Here is the link to this article http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2009909525_localflour21.html. As usual, the article was all about marketing the product and only peripherally mentions the actual farming. A glaring omission in the article became evident when it mentioned the no-till practices of Fred Fleming and the other growers involved in the Shepherds Grain marketing cooperative. No-till, as practiced in commodities agriculture, usually relies on massive amounts of Roundup and other herbicides to kill weeds. Yet the article hyped the "buy-local angle" and the purported healthy and nutritional aspects of the Shepherds Grain wheat for artisan bakers and retail consumers. In other words, these farmers are getting a premium price for their grain because of the marketing niche created by the real organic/local/sustainable farmers. In other words they have jumped on the bandwagon under false pretenses. If you go to this article, you can read the 32 comments posted before the comment period closed and you will notice that they are overwhelmingly suckered into thinking that Shepherds Grain wheat is somehow healthier and better for the local community. Nearly all the commenters failed to realize that Shepherds Grain wheat is still grown with herbicides and chemical fertilizers. I fault the article writer for this misperception.

For another journalist's slant on no-till wheat, check out Paul Roberts' article in Mother Jones for March 2, 2009, "Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008." Here is the link: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008. Roberts first four paragraphs discuss Fred Fleming and his use of Roundup and no-till practices for erosion control. Roberts then goes on to lambast the organic and local movements. The logical extension of his arguments is to agree with Monsanto, Cargill and others, who are now mounting extensive ad campaigns that we need MORE biotech solutions to feed the world, MORE agricultural subsidies for corporate agriculture, and MORE globalization. This is nonsense, of course, but Roberts is following in the path of many of the so-called peak oil "experts" who cannot grasp that they will have to get off their duffs, out from behind their computers, and actually work with their hands once they cannot get enough fossil fuels to continue with their profligate modern lifestyles - which includes writing books and getting fees on their lecture tours. Paul Roberts most famous book is The End of Oil (2005) and he also wrote The End of Food (2008). I have a few issues with Paul Roberts and I hope to address his Mother Jones' article specifically in my next blog. However, here are my comments to Melissa Allison in an email about her article. They may seem brutal to you, but I am not above calling someone on their intellectual dishonesty. [Disclaimer: ALL email is public property, including my own. This is just the reality of the cyberworld.]

Wheat Article Seattle Times 9-21-09

I just composed a long post for the Transition Whatcom site and there might be some interesting tidbits for you folks. I will just post it here. The bits and pieces should be self-explanatory.

If you let your squash mature, you won’t need the brown sugar or even the butter to make it taste good. Don’t worry so much about getting your dry beans in. The pods shed water. I got some of my kidneys in already and will get the cannelinis and other varieties in when I can. Steve Solomon is a very good source, but he is also big enough to admit when he makes a mistake, as he does in later editions of Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades. Saying that organic mulch acts as a wick to dry out the soil is one such mistake. I use both kinds of mulches and organic mulch keeps the soil moist and cool, while also adding organic matter as it breaks down. It all depends on how much mulch material I have on hand and if I can get to it. [I put in over 3000 hours a year into sustainable farming, so everything has to be efficient.] Yes, clay traps water, but has the same effect as a perched water table or plow sole. Solomon is quite right about giving plants more room so they can go farther for water and have more space generally. His latest book, Gardening When It Counts has some very nice drawings of root structures. Watering deeply is the best when doing irrigation, of course, and you might consider this when thinking about drip irrigation. I still use an impact sprinkler, with mobile hoses and a 10-day cycle, but we have our own well, so I am not paying exorbitant city rates for water. Our water is not chlorinated either, so you might want to consider this when doing irrigation, as you are adding salts as you water. [Oh, and if you are making sauerkraut, the chlorine kills the lactic acid fermentation.] A little bit of reading on the archaeological history of Sumer, Babylon and the like will give you a good scare. The Egyptian method of piping in wooden troughs was actually quite brilliant. I am now doing soaker hoses for my tomatoes and it works quite well. They have a lower carbon footprint than drip since they are made out of recycled materials, are less costly, and don’t plug up. Raised beds are a good idea for early crops as they effectively raise the ambient temperature 1 degree for every inch they rise. I use them for early salad mix. [By the way, I think greenhouses are overrated – huge energy hogs and the food lacks the quality taste that vegetables have when they are grown out in the wind and sunshine.]

Per the slugs and other pests, integrated pest management (IPM) is a useful tool. For example, if you worry about late blight, dig new potatoes in June and July. They will still store all winter and you get them out of the ground before the Phytophthora infestans raises its ugly head in early August. If the Irish hadn’t depended so heavily on the Lumper variety, which isn’t edible until October, more people would have survived the potato famine. Also, perhaps we should rethink our approach to pest control. As Eliot Coleman pointed out when he was here in Bellingham two years ago, there is some research that points to healthy soil repelling invaders. This works well with the postmodern paradigm of “feed the soil and the plants will do their best.” I still have arguments with one of the local good ole boys, now a realtor, who insists on a plant orientation, rather than a soil orientation. Per the kale comment, perhaps you should give kale another chance. Try sauteeing some onions until they are translucent, then pop in your rough-chopped kale. Turn down the heat and let steam for only a minute. I use a cast-iron pan, which holds heat well, so I just pop in the kale and turn the heat off and let it sit. It is really quite delicious cooked with a minimum of steaming.

Finally, per the food value of crops and the space they take up, I keep good records and I can tell you how many calories I grew last year and so far this year. If you want to actually measure energy input and output, you need a metric that crosses all platforms. You can use joules, BTU’s, KWH’s or kilocalories – they are all comparable with each other. I use kilocalories, which are listed on the sides of store-bought food anyway. [Disclaimer: Nutritionists have been calling kilocalories “calories” for years, so don’t get confused. They really mean kilocalories. Some authors will mention this and call them “large calories.”] When calculating caloric values, I use a single site for caloric values, www.caloriecount.about.com, so I am consistent with my methodology. So, for example, let’s say you get 1 pound of dry kidney beans per 4 feet of row and your rows are 2.5 feet apart. You are getting 1 pound for 10 square feet of space, which is the equivalent of 4,356 pounds per acre (43,560 sq. ft. in an acre). Since kidney beans have a caloric value of 1513 calories per pound, you are at 6.59 million calories per acre. This compares well with wheat, at 3-4 million calories per acre, and potatoes, at 6-8 million calories per acre. In point of fact, dry beans are an important component of food self-suffiency. If you add their soil-building value as legumes, they become one of the important tools of sustainable agriculture. I suspect the soil-building value of the lentils grown in the Palouse, for example, is much more beneficial to the farmers over there than their cash value.

This brings me to my last point. If you think with the modern business paradigm and the grand narrative, you will always find it cheaper to buy your beans from the co-op than growing your own. This misses the point entirely. I can state with certainty that I am many times more efficient than modern industrial agriculture because I actually produced 2 calories last year for every one I used (measured in fossil fuels for my tillers and my human labor). This year I am on track to produce 5 for 1. This would make me 50 times more efficient than food produced with tractor use and mechanical sorting, processing, etc (10 calories used to produce 1 calorie of food – the usual metric). Buying on price keeps you locked into the old modern business paradigm. The co-op is still locked into this model and they would rather buy certified organic from California than buy locally from people like myself who don’t get certified because of political reasons. If you are serious about transitioning out of fossil fuels, you should be buying from local producers. This is more inconvenient and may even cost more sometimes, but the cheap prices of food now give you a false sense of how much labor it really takes to produce food. All of us sustainable farmers are having a difficult time making a living. Meanwhile, people are getting cheap food that is made out of petroleum. If you want to do more than pay lip service to local farmers, you have to actually go out to the farms and buy from them. Farmers markets and the co-op are just baby steps on what has to be done. I call what I am doing postmodern agriculture because I have deconstructed the grand narrative of modern agriculture and found it wanting. Part of postmodern agriculture out here at F.A. Farm is teaching people how to grow food sustainably. I don't do internships because I think they are exploitative. However, if you want to work for food, you get a good deal and you can learn a lot while you have your hands in the soil.