F.A. Farm

A recent email from my local resource network contained an interview with a long-time proponent of the Brix scale and the use of refractometers. The interviewee also mentiond the work of Drs. Reams, Albrecht, Andersen and Skow. [You can google those names and get quite a lot of information on their work so I won't summarize.] The Brix scale is a measure of sugar content and what some people are now doing is to use this as a proxy for nutrient-density.

I have been aware of this line of thinking for several years, but it has always seemed too simplistic. The interview I read hasn't changed my mind any. It still smacks of pseudo-science, especially as the Brix reading can be altered by adding sugar to the solution or diluting the solution itself. However, the interview did make a comment about categorizing grapes via the Brix reading while they were green and that was rather astute. These grapes can then be sorted into more valuable wine grapes and less valuable concentrate grapes at harvest. This is similar to what the fieldmen in Washington are doing when they use a refractometer to help time the apple harvest so they will store well in the packing shed.
 
That said, I have been planning on buying a refractometer for several years, since I should have one for my apples once my trees get more mature and produce more. Then I can test some plants and see for myself whether Brix readings correlate well with taste and nutrition.
 
This also raises the larger question of subjectivity vs. objectivity. Subjectivity is just fine and people who are doing experiments that work DO NOT have to rise to a quantitative level that appears to be scientific. Simply saying the Brix scale is correlated with taste is quite enough. A researcher doesn't have to postulate that insects see something that we are measuring on an abstract numerical scale. [The example in the interview was that an insect sees weakness in a plant as a measurable wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum and attacks it. We can see the same thing on the Brix scale. This is laughable.] He just has to say it works. In point of fact, it is better to just say, "I feel better because I feed my soil and the plants feed me." One of the changes that are happening all around us is that the pseudo-scientific method used by economists and bankers who want to enhance their prestige by appearing to be objective is already in the toilet. It then becomes an opportunity to just start talking subjectively like the First Nations elders (or like us dirty hippies used to talk 40 years ago). I am a scientist and I say science is overrated.

[As another sidebar, the creationists used to use the term "scientific creationism." This was a political move to take advantage of the patina of objective scientific method in order to enhance credibility. It didn't take too long for real scientists to point out that there is no way to refute, or test, creationism, so it is not amenable to the scientific method. The creationists are now having more luck getting their message across to high schools across the country since they accepted their basis in subjectivity.]

Back in the day when I went to the gym (I don't need to work out now since I work many hours at hard labor), I once had a conversation with another exerciser about how much to eat. He was of the opinion that your stomach normally holds two fistfuls of food and you shouldn't eat more at one sitting. That actually is good advice - and it doesn't need any scientific studies or numbers! I remembered this conversation recently because I was thinking about how most Americans eat - large portions heavy on the meat and cereals, with just a pittance of fruits and vegetables. Our diet here on the farm is more of a "vegetablanarian" blend of vegetables and some meat for flavoring. Yet we also have a tendency to overload the portions, too. I think a better idea is to eat like a gourmet.

By eating like a gourmet, I mean to enjoy the tastes and the mingling of tastes in properly prepared foods. Very often, we like to serve a vegetable on its own, so we can discover the subtleties of that vegetable. (Think parsnips or Brussels sprouts for example.) The key here is not portion size, but rather the "bang for the buck" is in the taste. Most of us American types think more is always better, but it ain't necessarily so. Perhaps a good gauge is to have one dish that has a mingling of flavors and the other dishes just a simple vegetable or fruit. This allows for clarity of palette. Reducing the need for seasonings fits into this idea also. For example, I don't boil my potatoes in salted water and I can taste the natural mineral salts in the potatoes when they are done. If I need more salt, it is easy to add later. Part of this taste is the trace minerals I add to the soil as I build it up. It seems to me that plants that are healthy will have the right mix of vitamins and minerals - this is the real reason for soil development.

So, if we eat smaller portions and really enjoy what we eat, we can afford to eat higher-priced food. This is not typically what we think of when we think of gourmet eating, but the world is changing all around us. Why not be a gourmet on a budget?

Last night we got some rain, which we needed for germination. This morning, I noticed my French fingerlings are up. They were planted on April 11th and are a 65 day potato. I am tres pleased. My Red Thumb fingerlings have been up for some time (planted April 10th), which is what I expected. Red Thumbs are a nearly perfect fingerling - red inside and out, 65 day maturity, excellent as new potatoes, excellent keepers, with fantastic taste. The French fingerlings are getting quite a lot of press in the last couple of years and they have a romantic history. Supposedly, they were smuggled into this country in a feedbag of a horse, in the early part of the 20th century. They are also a 65 day potato, have a red skin and are buff-colored inside, often with a hint of a red blush or a red ring. They are quite tasty and store well.

Another early riser are my Bintjes. This is a Dutch potato that I tried last year for the first time and it is quite delicious and both yields and stores well. It has a yellow skin and is another 65 day potato. Last year, I started planting on April 6th and harvested my first new potatoes on June 12th. This year I started planting April 10th, so I anticipate potatoes in around mid-June again. As I say, I am tres pleased.

Back in 2006, I did a Ruth Stout-type potato experiment that worked quite well. [Ruth Stout was a cheery old gardener from New Jersey who developed a permanent mulch method. Her books are fun to read.] I got some extra potatoes from another farmer, laid them down on top of the ground and covered them with hay. The planting date was June 13th, which would normally be quite late to plant around here. The potatoes sprouted up through the mulch and grew fast. In mid-September, I just pulled the mulch away and harvested a bumper crop. There were also quite a few slug eggs as well, which is one of the downsides of this method. Here in NW Washington, we have a tremendous amount of slugs and they love mulch. However, exposing them to the air and the predators cuts down their propagation. The yield on these potatoes was up to 2.95# per row foot, but I did put quite a lot of potatoes down in the row and didn't weigh them first, so that is a kinked statistic.

In 2007, I tried this method again, but in two parts. The first part was laying some potatoes down under mulch in January and February. My thinking was that the potatoes would just sit dormant until the weather warmed them up. Well, the slugs ate most of them and the rest rotted. So much for that idea. The second part was to wait until April, when I normally plant potatoes. This worked better, but the yield was quite low. My conclusion was that the mulch keeps the soil too cool early on in this climate, which is why the June planting did so well. Another aspect of this experiment was that the labor for laying down the hay is greater than tilling and planting in bare soil. Thus, I went back to conventional methods.

This year I have some new ground opened up, with winter wheat growing on it. In one section, the ground is so wet and low the winter wheat did not germinate, so there is a bare spot. I also had a whole bunch of Banana fingerlings left over that had sprouted quite lengthy sprouts, some about 8-10 inches long. In addition, I have a bunch of hay from cleaning out the neighbor's barn, so I decided to try the experiment again. I marked out a 12' x 48' area and dumped 32# of fingerlings on the ground, trying to spread them around as much as possible. I then laid two pickup loads of loose hay on the potatoes. They are covered by about 6-8 inches. Hopefully, the sprouts will get enough soil moisture to continue growing up through the hay. We shall see how this works. I won't be able to cultivate, but the mulch should suppress the weeds well enough that I can just pick the ones that come up and the potatoes should crowd them out. Since it is almost May and we are getting an extended run of good weather this year, I am hoping the experiment is fruitful. I will report back on this later.

Since I have been promoting calories as a metric for energy usage, I decided to actually see how many calories I produced on the farm in 2008. The first step was to review my inventory control. What I do is to count and tally everything that comes in from the field, whether in pounds or bunches, into a notebook. I then take the figures into the house and enter them into my spreadsheet each night. The spreadsheet breaks down yield by succession planting, but I also transfer the numbers into a yield summary. I can thus track individual salad mix beds, for example, and also have a year-end summary per vegetable. The spreadsheet has columns for amount, price, total, row feet, value per row foot and value per acre. To check my inventory control, I account for all discrepancies between my actual gross receipts and the dollar value of everything that comes out of the field. This includes the value of what I give to the food bank, the value of what we eat ourselves, weight of the spoilage that goes into the compost, etc. Using these categories, I can account for all discrepancies between what I sell and what I produced, within 3.0%. In other words, I am controlling my error to within 3%, well within the 5% parameter I use for random chance.

Since I am confident in my numbers, I next researched the calories in each food item on the web. The site I used is www.caloriecount.about.com and I chose it because it seemed most comprehensive. It is also conservative, with the calories for winter squashes, for example, calculated at 153 per pound overall versus 176 on another site. (Squashes vary, with Hubbard being more calorie dense than Butternut, for example.)

After doing the research and data entry, I calculated my calorie output for each item by multiplying my yield by the calorie values and totaled the results. My calorie output for 2008, using these methods, came to 2,235,639 calories. The actual amount of land that produced this amount of calories was 1.01 acres, for an index of 2,213,504 calories per acre. I calculated my energy input in 2008 as 365,000 calories for my labor (365 days X 1000 calories per day - this is probably too high) and 775,000 calories for tiller gas (25 gallons x 31,000 calories per gallon). This means that I produced 2.21 million calories with 1.14 million calories of sweat and petrol - this comes to 1.94 calories produced for every calorie of input. The number is likely higher since I tilled and planted 2 acres last year. The extra acre was for cover crops and experiments (like my wheat). I also did not actually put 1000 calories into the farm every day last year, but I am erring on the side of caution. The upshot is that I produced enough calories to feed 2.42 people (at 2500 calories a day for 365 days).

The bottom line is that I can measure my calorie inputs and outputs and I can state with certainty that sustainable agriculture WILL produce enough food to feed AT LEAST 2.5 people per acre, using hand labor and tillers. Since I am not as productive as I want and I can actually till, plant and harvest 2 acres by myself, I can say with confidence that 1 person can feed AT LEAST 5 people using sustainable methods. For those of you who might quibble about 25 gallons of gas to work 2 acres, consider how much gas you use each week in your cars. Since we are in a Transition period, rather than a No-Gas period, minimal amounts of fossil fuels are justified.  I also anticipate my tiller gas usage will continue to drop year by year as I become more efficient. The point is that I can give you production numbers, using a metric (calories) which can be used for humans, petroleum, and even horses.

The April 19th issue of Pacific Northwest, a Sunday magazine for the Seattle Times, featured an article by Tom Watson called "From Farm to Fork." This was quite a good article but  had a couple of flaws, which I mentioned in an email to the article author. Even though I take exception to a couple of statements, the article was quite good and I recommend it. The main points in the email are reproduced below.

1) "Inefficiencies from a single pickup bringing a farm-load of produce for a weekly event." [This refers to Farmers Markets.] This is a common error now being used by mainstream economists to actually assert a semi-trailer bringing produce from California is more efficient than local produce (and I did hear this at the Food Justice Conference in Bellingham on April 18th from a supposed "environmental" economist). The trap is that economists have kept a proprietary stranglehold on "efficiency" for so long because they refuse to use a common metric that crosses all platforms. For instance, a semi for interstate commerce weighs 80,000 pounds loaded and can carry 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of freight (higher weights require special permits, so I am just using the standard weights for convenience - I am sure you get my point). If the average distance produce travels in the US is 1500 miles, a semi gets 5 miles per gallon and diesel is equivalent to 35,000 calories per gallon (all checkable on the Internet, by the way), we can calculate the average calorie load of a pound of produce arriving at the store. This is 300 gallons of diesel, for 10.5 million calories divided by 45,000 pounds of produce. The calorie load calculates to 233 calories per pound - just for the fuel. If the truck has a maximum freight of 50,000, the calorie load is still 210. This does not include the embedded calories in the semi's steel, platinum in the catalytic converter, rubber in the tires, etc. These are hard to measure and one of the actual costs of transportation the nerdboys should be investigating. The point is that an average pound of tomatoes has a calorie load in excess of 200 calories by the time it gets to the supermarket. Tomatoes have a caloric value of 91 calories, so a pound of tomatoes ends up with a calorie value of 300 or more.

In comparison, let's say I drive 12.5 miles (25 miles round trip) to the Bellingham Farmers Market with 1000 pounds of produce on my pickup, which gets 22 miles per gallon and the calorie value of gasoline is 31,000 calories per gallon. My produce now has a calorie load of only 35 calories for the fuel. If I only haul 500 pounds to the market, my calorie load is 70 calories per pound. This is still only one-third of the average calorie load of a pound of produce in the supermarket. Also, note that I sold at the Ferndale Farmers Market last year, which is only 3 miles away from our farm, so my calorie load for 500 pounds was only 17 calories per pound of produce. [This does not include the embedded calories of my pickup, but as I mentioned earlier, I cannot find good approximations of the embedded calories for my pickup vs. a semi.] Of course, we can lower our calorie load even further, such as with satellite-distribution networks, as mentioned in your article. I have been working on this here in Whatcom County for three years now, but there are difficulties - mostly with the modern mindset and the restaurants having their needs catered to for so many years.

My point is that the use of calories (or even joules) takes all the air out of the economists' argument for long-haul transportation, as well as globalization in general. This is not a radical concept anymore, as anthropologists have been using calories in evaluating traditional cultures for at least 40 years and the Post Carbon Institute uses calories and joules in their analyses. For a fuller discussion, you can go to my blog http://www.localharvest.org/blog/15945/entry/the_calorie_cost_of_using

2) "May lead to waste if customers don't like or eat what's in their boxes." [This refers to CSA programs.] This is a common complaint heard by CSA farms, but it misses the point entirely. If I give someone a pound of sunchokes (345 calories) and they don't eat them, their waste is MINIMAL compared to what the average consumer is wasting every day in the normal course of events. Americans are incredibly wasteful, so making a big deal out of not eating a small amount of food that can be composted or given away to someone else is really about scoring points on a cheap shot, rather than a valid ecological question. The packaging on a box of cornflakes thrown in the garbage has many more calories than the pound of sunchokes in the CSA box - and they are among the highest calorie values in a CSA share! The actual "waste" of a pound of New Zealand spinach (65 calories), for example, is much less.

The actual problem here is that the shareholder got something they couldn't use. However, any CSA share program can make adjustments the next week and the shareholders usually get so much more than they paid for each week, it is still a great value - even accounting for the occasional produce not eaten. I even give my shareholders credit for what they didn't like, so they win all the way around. This also touches on another point. I am subsidizing all my customers on the farm with my labor. I do not make a fair wage, nor even anywhere close to the minimum wage. The shareholders and other customers may have an office job, or even work in a factory, but they still get a much higher wage than I do. This is a problem for all farmers and is the real reason family farms are in such short supply. The system of exploiting farmers, peasants, serfs and slaves has been in existence for at least 5,000 years, since the first glimmerings of civilization. It doesn't rise to our attention very often because of the overabundance of material goods in this country. However, once petrol is in short supply, there is a chance for the farmer to actually make a living and be appreciated.

The bottom line for me is that we need to question the academics and the coporate types who have had a stranglehold on ideas for so long. The postmodern business model provides a metric that allows us to actually measure efficiency. I know that my produce has a lower impact on the environment than that grown in the Imperial Valley and shipped across the whole country. I shouldn't have to listen to nonsense that simply reinforces globalization and status quo by kinking the argument.

The USDA Ag census says that there were 12,549 CSAs in 2007, but Local Harvest has only 2,700+ in their database. This is a problem, and the problem is not with Local Harvest, but rather with the USDA methodology. If you go to the USDA website http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/csa/csa.shtml you will see this number and you can look at the report. I recommend Appendix A, which details the methodology used. Here are some of the problems.
1) Mailout and mailback was the primary data collection method.
2) The mailback was followed up by electronic data collection over the Internet and phone followup to non-responders.
3) Paid media was used to reach a narrow target group of difficult-to-reach farms.
4) Missing data was imputed using past survery reports and methods from the 2002 census.
5) Statistical estimation was used to cover non-response when other methods failed.

There are so many problems with US Census procedures that the Democrats have been pushing for years for random sampling, rather than trying to measure the whole population, as the Republicans support. This antipathy is political, of course, because a true random sampling would redraw Congressional districts to the favor of the Democrats, so of course the Republicans want to keep the present flawed system. It should be noted that the best overall population census was the first, commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085, to actually get a real count of the wealth of Anglo-Saxon England, which was now under his control. Even then, the detailed count of the Little Domesday Book was superseded by the Great Domesday Book, simply because of the time and manpower needed for detailed data collection. Wikipedia has a very nice discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book The point here is that even with a subjugated nation and plentiful men-at-arms to make counts, the original plan had to be modified.

Okay, per the mailout and mailback problem, one of the little cliches in anthropology is that when a sociologist wants to do a survey on how much people recycle, he (or she) asks the informant and accepts the answer as true. What the anthropologist does is to pick through their garbage to actually see how much they recycle. For those of you who have done data collection in the field, you know the myriad of questions you go through and the thousands of little decisions you make, fitting normal human responses into pigeon-hole categories on your data sheet. There is a very good reason Mark Twain popularized Benjamin Disraeli's famous remark, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." This is simply because the errors start right at data collection.

Now, once you have non-responses (and the 2007 survey had an 85.2% response rate versus 88.0% in 2002 and 86.2% in 1997) you have bias. However, in this survey, "There was no effort to measure nonresponse bias for the census (page A-11)." Yet, there was a concerted effort to do Internet and phone followup to the non-responders. So, rather than make an attempt to get a grip on the bias generated by a 15% non-response rate, the USDA simply ignored the problem in favor of harrassing people so they could have the appearance of measuring the whole population. [Sidebar: a random sample means that every datum in the population has an equal chance of being in the sample - this is far superior to trying to measure the whole population. Population in this sense is the whole set of items to be included, not just the human population of the US.]

So, after there was still a non-response problem, the USDA used paid media and imputed values through past methodology account for the non-responders. The term in the Appendix for this effort is called Coverage Adjustment (page A-7). Now, the methodology is including more data that doesn't exist into the database. This is just nonsense and raises the question of how much effort is being expended to get specific results for a specific political purpose. Certainly, these adjustments are amplifying the bias the database already contains.

Finally statistical estimation was used when all other efforts failed to cover the non-responders. So, after they tweak the database so that it says what they want it to say, they subject their skewed and biased data to some statistical fancy footwork to shore up their results. As an example, look at Table A of Appendix A under Farms by Value of Sales under $1000. The Total of 688,833 includes Nonresponse Adjustments of 12.45% and Coverage Adjustments of 30.03%. In other words, adjustments account for 42.48% of this category! I ask you, does it make sense that you can get a valid result if close to half of the data for a category comes from adjustments? Of course not. You know, these people are getting paid a GOOD SALARY to put out this kind of nonsense. Meanwhile, you and I cannot get paid a fair price for the food we grow.

Finally, per the Local Harvest database - their database consists of motivated CSA farms who want to sell shares. Thus there is no real bias because the database is a self-selected sample. The listing is free and there is no long-standing bias against reporting (I.e. no "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." - Run, Forest, run!). There is also no harrassment if people don't list information, unlike the USDA census. The Local Harvest database has a limited use, but we know the limitations. The USDA, on the other hand, is intentionally pulling a fast one on the public.

Recently, a fellow grower asked why I sell through a broker, since my focus is direct marketing. My reply was simply that my brokers allow me to be a price-maker, instead of a price-taker. Since she is one of the sharper knives in the drawer, she immediately grasped the difference and the implications. However, this question deserves a fuller treatment for those of you not in the business who might be interested.

I grew up on a dairy farm and we had to take whatever price the creamery gave us for our milk; we had to take whatever price the elevator gave us for our corn and soybeans; and we had to take whatever price the stockyards gave us for our steers and hogs. In short, we were price-takers. What I want to do now is to be a price-maker. In order to do this, I must use direct marketing as my main marketing tool, although some changes are on the horizon in the field of marketing. For example, Growing Washington is a local nonprofit that serves as an interface between the grower and the consumer, whether they are individuals, restaurants, or institutions such as schools. Growing Washington buys from me at my price, even though I have to keep my price low since I am directly competing with other farmers. Yet this direct competition, in the context of setting my own prices, is far superior to just giving up pricing control to a wholesale distributor or processing plant. In short, the important point is to be a price-maker, and this requires some direct marketing. The more important component is to have multiple markets. I usually have 4-5 markets each year. This year they are 1) my CSA share program, 2) on-farm sales, 3) a multi-farm CSA share program, 4) a broker for the Ferndale Farmers Market, and 5) a broker for Seattle restaurants, schools, and their own produce stand. Only the first two are direct marketing per se, but the other three only have a single entity between me and the end user (I regard a restaurant as an end user). In all of these markets, I set my own prices. This is far different from being a price-taking commodity farmer, like we were back in the mid-1960's. 

Another market I am trying to develop is a buying club, and if this idea gets off the ground, I will be the facilitator between several Ferndale farms and the buying club in Bellingham. However, I will not be a broker, but rather a coordinator. As I mentioned earlier, there are different marketing alternatives being developed right now and hopefully, they will take some of the burden of marketing and distribution off the farmer.

On April 10th & 11th, Western Washington University hosted a Food Justice Conference. I sat on a panel Saturday morning on local food availability. Afterwards, Toni and I sat in the audience for another panel discussion about the economics of local food. The first panel discussion raised some issues of availability and the need for active consumers, but the lack of engagement to the current economic crisis and the ongoing food distribution crisis was simply alarming. The second discussion was a little more animated, but had the qualities of a classroom discussion, rather than a call to action. The two panel presenters were an "environmental" economist and a book author. Since the economist is a well-known prof at Western and on several task forces dealing with future issues in Whatcom County, I expected a little more hard analysis. Yet, his approach is still based on hemming and hawwing (and I don't mean the actor in the crappy Antonioni film). To my question on applying the calorie measure to energy usage to give a real measure that crosses all platforms, he simply stated that it depends on what you want to measure. Here is my thinking on the use of calories.

We measure energy by the ability to do work. For example, a horsepower is the equivalent of the work done by a draft horse pulling something. [Now before I get any more snotty comments from nerdboys trying to score cheap points - yes I know that one horsepower = 33,000 foot pounds per minute. I am using an example that is readily available to anyone to make a point.] If your car has 400 horsepower, it is the equivalent of having 400 horses under the hood pulling you, and the ton of metal in which you are sitting, down the road. Quite a waste, isnt't it? It is even more appalling if you are just going half a mile down the street to get a pack of cigarettes at the convenience store. But how would you compare the energy usage if you just walked to the store and back? This is where we need a metric that crosses all platforms. ["Crossing all platforms" is a particularly rich rhetorical sound bite I am fond of using lately, since we all know how the Internet is available on Macs, PCs, or Linux-based hardware - i.e. it crosses all platforms.] Calories are a measure of heat and caloric values are available everywhere, even on the packaging of the food you buy. Although this use of calories is a misnomer because they are actually kilocalories (the amount of heat needed to raise 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius, rather than 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius), it is similar to the use of dialects and creoles in language. In other words, consistent current usage argues for just using it instead of arguing over precision. This so-called "large" calorie is the same across all cans of peas or bags of flour, so why not use it, even though the nerdboys will quibble?

A more precise measure of energy usage is the joule, first developed by James Joule in the 19th century as an exact mechanical equivalence of heat (he must have been a nerdboy). It can also be used to measure electricity. A joule is the energy expended by a force of one newton moving an object for a distance of one meter. A newton is named after Isaac Newton and is the force needed to accelerate one kilogram one meter per second. It should not be surprising that the use of acceleration comes from the co-inventor of the calculus, or that it obviates the problem of breaking the inertia of a body at rest. In electrical terms, a joule is the energy needed to pass a current of one amp through a resistance of one ohm for one second. A joule is a more precise measurement than a calorie, simply because the heat needed to raise a kilogram of water one degree Celsius actually increases slightly as the temperature increases. So, the amount of heat needed to raise the water from 14 to 15 degrees is slightly larger than the amount needed to raise the water from 10 to 11 degrees. It should be obvious why Joule developed a measure that used acceleration on a curve rather than a simple linear rise. However, is a large-scale adoption of a trickier method of measuring energy really necessary? Doesn't the calorie measurement work well enough? I think it does. It has not become necessary for the whole world to adopt the metric system, for example. The English and the metric systems have rough equivalents and international commerce moves right along with only minor glitches. So it is with using calories to measure energy. By using calories, we get a better measure than carbon footprints. For example, if I am not burning a fossil fuel to plant potatoes, how do I measure my human labor? The answer is calories. So I have settled on calories as a measure that crosses all platforms. I can get a rough equivalence for human labor, gasoline consumption, horses pulling a plow, pumping water out of the ground, embedded calories in a piece of steel that forms the fender of a tractor, etc., etc., etc.

The problem with economists is that they are very selective in what they measure. Thus, you could have the supposed "environmental" economist on yesterday's panel uttering such nonsense as it is more efficient to grow cucumbers in California on large farms and ship them across the country because the economies of scale lower the cost of producing and transporting the cucumber. The economist and the author both chimed in on the concept of local food being "dangerous" and should not be accepted as a valid environmental benefit without extensive studies. When pressed for a simple measure, such as calories, they both hemmed and hawed.

Here's the bottom line. Everyone who can read has been well aware of the environmental degradation that results from the profligate American lifestyle. Yet there is a simple measurement of energy that crosses all platforms and will actually tell you how efficient human labor is, compared to using fossil fuels to grow monoculture crops. This simple measure cannot even be accepted by an "environmental" economist, nor by an author who writes books on the problems. Yet the economist and the author get their salary check and royalty check at the end of the month. Meanwhile, I grow food and I cannot make a fair wage selling that food.

Notice the large standard deviation in the US sample. This is to be expected because of the tremendous variation in a large country with varying degrees of sophistication in understanding farming, much less a new idea of capital acquisition. However, I would say that Whatcom County is decidedly behind the curve in pricing CSA shares.

A recent blog purports to reassure people that HR 875 does not pose a problem for small farmers. When I tried to comment, my response was marked as spam. Therefore, I am including my comments on this blog.

I suggest people read the text of the bill. The problem falls into two categories:
1) What does the statutory language say?
2) Is it valid to just trust the legislators?

I spent one year in law school some years ago and even though our focus as 1L's was on the required courses, we did cover a little bit of statutory language and especially how the definitions in the first part of a bill "set up" the rest of the statute. So, as an answer to question 1) above, the statutory language does indeed allow for random inspections by the Administrator. Just look at Categories 1-5 and the actual regulatory sections. As an example, a food establishment is a "facility owned or operated by a person located in any State that processes food or a facility that holds, stores, or transports food or food ingredients." Section 3 (13) A. This would include your refrigerator in your farm stand as well as your farm stand in general.

As for question 2), do you really trust your legislators? If you do, I have a bridge for sale in New York state. As we used to say back in Minnesota, "If someone comes to you and says 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help you;' you should turn around and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction."

Many people have legitimate concerns about this bill. Simply calling them "chicken littles" or quoting legislators, lobbyists, or agribusiness professionals (which includes organic certifiers by the way) does not constitute a valid endorsement. All these people have a vested interest and are tainted. Regular citizens that are concerned are not tainted.

Back in the late 60's and early 70's, a synthesis of hip and radical became necessary. After the air-brushed photo of Charles Manson on the cover of Life magazine December 19, 1969, every flower child became an instant satanic killer in the minds of the public. A wonderful Christmas present for a segment of the population (i.e. the hippies) that had already become disenfranchised by stormtrooper tactics on a daily basis, wouldn't you say? This is not just revisionist bosh, by the way. The basis of this statement is personal experience, an explanation of the techniques used by a commercial artist, and a subjective sample of articles in both the mainstream media and the underground newspapers at the time. By the fall of 1969, the killing at Altamont had already happened and the mainstream media was calling for the death of the counterculture (by hanging if need be). This pre-Christmas attempt by Life magazine to sway public opinion was quite a savvy attempt to polarize the populace in the same manner as Vice-President Agnew's numerous diatribes. Then, during the winter and spring of 1970, President Nixon attempted to escalate the Vietnam War to Cambodia, the first Earth Day was held, and the murders at Kent State and Jackson State brought the War home with a vengeance. Clearly, a crux point in the Movement had been reached. A song from the Grateful Dead caught the tenor of the times quite well.
"I don't know, but I've been told
If a horse don't pull, you've got to carry the load.
I don't know whose back's that strong,
Maybe find out before too long."
- New Speedway Boogie (Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter - from the album Workingman's Dead, 1970)
NOTE: This song was actually about the Altamont incident.

What happened then was that many people in the counterculture decided their backs were indeed strong enough and started working in several directions at once. The student radicals found out that there was a pool of committed hippies out there, ready to put their energy into concrete solutions. The hippies, in turn, found out that the student radicals were not just former "clean for Gene" pseudo-intellectuals who had traded their horn-rimmed glasses for a pair of Lennon look-alikes and a cheap copy of Mao's Little Red Book purchased from the Black Panthers. This synthesis was quite important and helped along by the realization that yes, the cops and National Guardsmen will shoot you and the rest of America will cheer them on.

Out of this synthesis, centered around 1970, came the co-op movement, the back-to-the-land movement, the environmental movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the organic food movement, and the feminist movement. [Sorry if I missed your movement, but I am just commenting on the ones with which I have experience.] Of course, all these movements existed well before 1970, but in much smaller numbers. After the winter and spring of 1969-1970, both the number of participants and the sheer volume of energy increased exponentially. It was like yeast when a sugar-rich medium reaches a certain temperature - it blooms explosively (and yes, I cribbed this analogy from The Sea Wolf by Jack London).

So, why bother with this bit of countercultural history at this point in time? Simply put, we face a major crisis. Once again, we need a synthesis. I do a lot of posting on both the Local Harvest forum and this blog, as well as another blog. I am a member of two listservs that deal with postmodern agriculture - one local, one national. I also have an informal circle of like-minded folks who send me forwarded emails and articles that bear on the problems we face today. The problem is multi-faceted, but the downfall of the US economy seems to be a valid blanket term. The solution is to feed ourselves locally, since we may not be able to get grapes from Chile or oranges from Australia. Thus the locavore movement. Currently, there seem to be two trends in this movement. One is the earth-friendly trend that gravitates towards biodynamics and subjective solutions to subjective analyses. The other is the scientific trend, which takes a hard-nosed objective approach to solving food problems and comes up with objective answers. These objective answers do NOT include GMO's by the way, since they are not sustainable in the long run. The synthesis of these two trends, or streams, or ways of thinking about the problem, seems to be that they are both flowing towards the same solutions. The solution really is sustainable agriculture, which I see as postmodern - a reaction to modern petroleum-intensive agriculture. So, just as we needed a solution in 1970 - we had to see whose back was strong - we now need a synthesis of the subjective and the objective to solve an even more pressing problem. If the peak oil folks are right in their predictions, your children and grandchildren will face a much tougher world than we did in the 1970's. We need to pull together.