F.A. Farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Up here in the Fourth Corner, we get plentiful rain in the winter and sometimes we have quite a bit of water standing in the fields until late spring. Some farmers have had to wait until late June to even get out to their fields in past years (and maybe this year). We also have drought conditions in summer, so irrigation is necessary. Building up organic matter in the soil only goes so far in regulating soil moisure, so I am going to take a page from ancient agriculture and try chinampas this year. Chinampas were an intensive cultivation system used by the Aztecs on Lake Tenochtitlan. When Cortez and his men saw them in 1519, they referred to them as "floating gardens," but they were actually raised beds recovered from lake and marsh areas. Chinampas are still used in Mexico City to this day, usually for growing flowers. The typical chinampa was 15-30 feet wide and 300 feet long. They were constructed by digging trenches on the side or bringing muck and dropping it in a marked-out area. When the chinampa was finished, the Aztecs planted willow trees around the perimeter to anchor the soil. They also used an early version of soil blocks for plant starts - an aid in maximum plant survival to harvest versus direct seeding. There are three main requirements in intensive agriculture; irrigation, fertilization, and labor. The structure of the chinampas maximized soil moisture and additional water was available in the ditches/canals next to the chinampas. Fertilization was provided by the muck (similar to the Nile flooding, by the way), and human labor was plentiful for the Aztecs.

My idea is to take the chinampa idea, add some insights from the old Irish "lazy beds," and adapt them to Whatcom County. The lazy beds of pre-famine Ireland were usually four feet wide and the seed potatoes were laid on the ground. Ditches were dug on the side using the loy, or turf cutter, and the overturned sod laid on top of the potatoes. Hilling up later in the season was done by digging deeper in the ditches. I have tried growing potatoes under mulch and it worked well. I don't do this now because it is more labor intensive than row cropping using a tiller and I grow a lot of potatoes. So, combining the chinampas and the lazy beds, I am going to lay out a grid with 4 foot wide raised beds and the soil will be provided by digging an 18" wide ditch on each side. The 18" is the width of my cultivating tiller, but I could actually go 2 feet wide since there will be some "roll-down" from the raised beds. A 4 foot wide raised bed allows me to reach 2 feet in from either ditch, so that is optimal. Right now my salad mix beds are 30" wide and I can straddle them if needed. However, if I dig my ditches deep enough, I can actually stand in the ditch and weed and harvest without bending over too much. Soil moisture should not be a problem and I can actually do some ditch irrigation if needed. This will certainly be cheaper than drip irrigation and should use less water than an impact sprinkler. I will also throw the biomass from weeding, cabbage leaves, stalks, etc. into the ditch to decompose. If I am tilling the ditch and there is plentiful soil moisture, the composting process in the ditches should be speeded up. An added benefit of raised beds is to gain an extra degree in soil temperature for each inch you have above the surrounding soil, so this system could actually allow earlier planting because of dryness AND warmer soil temps.

I am looking forward to testing out this idea. The fly in the ointment is the labor requirements. I already have access to more land for this experiment, and I might pitch it to a local high school for one of their projects. I could come out and help set up the markers, show the students how to dig efficiently and let them have at it. They could grow potatoes or any number of crops. Then, next year, we could see if we could get out on the chinampas a couple of weeks earlier than normal.

Toni and I regularly eat a late supper. She works long hours as a social worker and I am always "on" with farmwork, housework, computer work, etc. I also get stronger as twilight comes on, what the Old Norse called "kveldulfur" or "evening wolf." This is nothing to sneeze at, as I am nearing 60 and being tired in the middle of the day is a common occurrence. Anyway, last night KUOW, one of the Seattle radio stations, had a replay of Michael Pollan's talk in Seattle on January 12, 2009. Since I read his last three books and Toni and I are actively involved in the same proselytizing, we made supper and ate while listening to his talk. Our menu hit several points he made in his speech (basically a recap of his latest book, In Defense of Food). There was the red wine (the French paradox), fresh Brussels sprouts and boiled potatoes (eat mostly plants), grass-fed hamburgers (stay away from corn-fed beef), homemade whole wheat bread (do for yourself), and pumpkin pie (take a cue from the Native Americans and adapt it to your needs). A wonderful repast - the conversation and background were sparkling.

Okay, now to a single crux point. One of Pollan's rhetorical flourishes was to ask, "How do we change the western diet without changing western civilization?" The answer is, "We can't. Nor should we." Western civilization is one of the major problems in the world. Over the last 40 years, as a "dirty hippie," street radical, homeless ragamuffin, ski bum, circus ringmaster, medieval armor-maker, archaeologist, word processor, law school student, grad student, anthropology instructor and now sustainable farmer, there have been several constants in my worldview. One of these is that state-level societies are the real problem. Clan-based societies never really marshall enough resources to change the world in such a dramatic fashion as we have witnessed in the last 150 years. Only civilization could produce industrialism. A return to tribalism is now being identified as a key to the conflict in the Mideast and the greater Arab world. Obviously, there is a pushback against western civilization, as well as an implosion since it just doesn't work. Ancient civilizations required slaves and our modern civilizations are built upon the energy slave of petroleum products. This will not last and civilization itself seems doomed. So . . . Is this a bad thing? I didn't think so in the 60's and I don't think so now. We can hasten the demise of western civilization by not eating a western civilization diet. The idea of eating as a political act has been hammered to death over the years, but it still survives. Like tribal and clan culture, eating food (not food-like products) will survive the collapse of western civilization. Many people look for a seamless transition from our current troubles to a localized community. It's not likely, so amongst the joy of eating good food, we should keep our wits about us and try not to get hit by the debris of the crumbling western empires.

Yesterday, I drove a 75-mile round trip to a meeting and the person who set up the meeting didn't show. There were two of us who drove down and the cost in mileage, lunch and wasted time was approximately $100. Obviously, I  won't be doing business with this person in the future. The offending (in several senses of the word since this is quite a rude way of conducting business) party is the owner of a produce market in Everett and he is looking to cut his costs. He already sells produce to stores in Ferndale and Bellingham and right now his truck is traveling empty back to Everett twice a week. The idea was to provide a link in the transportation chain, so I can sell more produce in the Seattle metro area, which is approximately 100 miles south of me. The idea was quite doable, and I have been flogging multiple transport solutions for three years now, but all good ideas fail if you cannot trust someone to actually show up at a meeting they proposed. Now we both lose. There is also a larger problem exposed by this example. Now, as times are getting tougher, we need to keep our agreements. I have some ideas on how business practices have deteriorated over the years, but I still don't accept them. In other words, I understand how people overschedule, get spaced out, run late, etc. The key point is that I don't accept it. Simply put, how can I expect to get paid if you cannot be trusted to do something as simple as show up for a meeting? We all need to inculcate more business ethics into our behavior in this time of troubles. This is key to establishing greater ties of community. To steal a phrase from Gilbert Shelton, "Community will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no community."

Muhammad Yunus received the Nobel prize in 2006 for his work in developing microcredit - tiny amounts of credit available for poor villagers (mostly women) in Bangladesh. This loan program has been embraced by many other countries around the world and has helped 500 million people. Obviously, a very good solution to one of the main problems in agriculture - capital to buy seeds, hire labor, buy equipment, and just to live until harvest. In this country, we have another version of microlending that I find VERY helpful - CSA share programs. As most everyone knows by now, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share programs pay the farmer upfront so he/she can buy seeds, hire labor, buy equipment, and just live until harvest. It requires the consumer to become a shareholder, in effect a partner, in the farm. I am in my third year of a CSA program and I actually got enough early money to buy seeds this year. Last week, I spoke with a banker and a developer and I asked them their perspectives on the looming credit crunch for mainstream farmers in the US. My fear is that, with the banks frozen and not lending, many farmers will not be able to plant. Then, the bankers and the government might wake up in July or August and realize there is not enough grain to go around. After that, it is anybody's guess what the response will be. When I asked about this scenario, both the banker and developer said that banks are lending, but simply enforcing more stringent credit standards. This assuaged my fears a little bit, but I still wonder about even a 5% dip in planting acreage. True, there was a 20% greater harvest in 2008 over 2007, but it is still worrisome. When Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, dropped target prices for grain and introduced the subsidy system, the federal government stopped lending farmers money and instead gave farmers a check. By convincing farmers to plant "fence row to fence row," he assured a glut in the market. Since the 70's, production has increased and prices have decreased. Last winters $15/bushel wheat was largely a speculative blip. So now we don't have a pool of fallow land in the soil bank, like in the 60's. What we have is constant upwards pressure on production, and a looming drop in production if farmers don't get capital. A recipe for disaster, as food availability is determined by a few ethically-challenged bankers. So, what to do? I suggest you run, not walk, to your nearest CSA farm and plunk down some money so the farmer can plant.

This morning I read the third installment of a special report on the problems with Chinese honey. This report was published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The first two installments were published December 30th and 31st, 2008, and track a problem with tainted honey from China that is intentionally routed through other countries before arriving in the US. American beekeepers cannot produce enough honey to meet demand and so two-thirds of the honey consumed in the US has to be imported. For years, China has been producing the lion's share of these imports, but they had a problem with bee die-off and used a potent antibiotic, chloramphenicol, to deal with it. This is illegal and unconscionable, but the tainted honey gets through anyway. There are several culprits in this fiasco and they all point fingers at everyone else. This situation calls for direct action on the part of the consumer and the direct action is? You guessed it - buy local honey. I have at least four sources of local honey right around me and I find it to be a good value in price, as well as in its medicinal/nutritional qualities. I seem to have alder allergies and spend quite a bit of downtime in early spring because I am so tired. I tried a daily spoonful of local honey last year and it seemed to help. This year I will be more rigorous in my application, so I can track the effects better. Anyway, you cannot depend on a government agency to watch out for you, so the solution is bloody obvious. Know where your food comes from. The best measure of nutritional safety is to know the first name of the farmer who grew your food.

Last night we had our first Sustainability at the Stein group night. The Frank N Stein is a local brewpub (smallest brewpub in America!) owned by Lloyd Zimmerman and located in Ferndale, Washington. They are open Wednesdays - Saturdays, starting at 5 pm. This is my regular hangout on Wednesday nights, so Lloyd and I decided to do an informal casual meeting on Wednesdays at 6 pm (approximately - this is Ferndale). Last night was our first night and there were 6 of us, including my significant other and myself. Three of the other people were backyard gardeners wanting to increase production and the other person is doing a startup business based on selling local products, featuring both crafts and agricultural produce. I also got my Fedco seed order yesterday, so I delivered the seeds to one person who had ordered cooperatively with me. The idea was to bring at least one topic to the table and let the talk flow. This worked quite well. As most of my friends know, I hate meetings and corporate mindsets, so the informal atmosphere, availability of beer and comfy chairs was conducive to good discussion. The topic I brought last night was sprouts, since I am currently flogging sprouts as a cheap, easy alternative to storebought winter greens. We usually have greens in the garden all winter up here in the rain belt, but this winter was colder than usual and my broccoli, chard, mustard mix, collards, mache, etc. are all frozen out. (I don't have a greenhouse or hoop tunnel.) For those of you who read my blogs, I did a blog on sprouts earlier on this forum. At last night's meeting, I brought several jars with sprouts in various stages of growth and the radish sprouts were the most popular. The discussion also spread to bio-charcoal, late blight in tomatoes and the local farmers market. We want to continue this informal group night into the indefinite future and I invite anyone in the area to stop by. The beer is good and also cheap by Bellingham standards. I like this concept of maximum flexibility with people just showing up but having something to contribrute. What I don't want to see is someone coming by with a product to sell and a polished pitch. I really dislike branding and other aspects of the corporate playbook. In fact, I am starting to read Naomi Klein's No Logo (2000), which is all about the rise of branding and problems created by mega-corporations who buy outsourced products, slap a brand on them and market the brand, not the product. But . . . that is fuel for another blog. 

I got a new world atlas recently and I took a look at agricultural patterns around the world. I was especially struck by the shifting cultivation mode in the equatorial areas of South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The complementary mode of production alongside shifting cultivation (or horticulture) was herding (or pastoralism). This is most clearly seen in Africa where the Sahara butts up against tropical forests. From an anthropological perspective, shifting cultivation is characterized by leaving some fields fallow and moving the cultivation around, oftentimes by slash and burn production methods. It is most effective in areas of low human population densities. Herding is also most effective for low human population densities, since it requires more land. However it can fit in alongside shifting cultivation, where it is useful in arid areas not suited to cultivation. In other words, most of Africa is doomed. The indigenous cultures are locked into a small population farming mode when their human populations are booming. The current border wars are exacerbating a problem that is already critical and the AIDS epidemic adds yet a third layer on top of the toxic mix of population pressure and ethnic violence.

Intensive cultivation requires more labor (especially if terracing and irrigation is used) and soil amendments to restore soil fertility, but it can feed larger rural populations. So . . . is the answer for Africa to transition into high labor, high fertilizer input intensive cultivation? Clearly, the American model of petrol-intensive industrial farming with tractors and chemical fertilizers has failed, all the hype about the Green Revolution notwithstanding. Can some of the methods that US sustainable farmers are using be applied to the equatorial belt and specifically to Africa? Are there actually NGO's on the ground in Africa that are concentrating on wise use of human labor to be more productive? The genus Homo arose in Africa around 2 million years ago and this was a real revolution, unlike the phony revolution based on petroleum, high capital costs and proprietary seeds. I suspect there are indigenous sustainable solutions that could be implemented right now in Africa and other parts of the world, some prompted by what sustainable farmers are doing in the US, but mostly prompted by indigenous people. Traditionally, anthropologists and aid workers have not listened very closely to what indigenous people have to say. Perhaps this is changing by the weight of necessity.

In your desire to eat healthy on a budget, don't forget the sprouts. Right now, I have alfalfa, mung, radish and aduki sprouts going in quart jars. I use a canning ring and a piece of nylon window screen trimmed to fit inside the ring. You can use the actual lid for a template and draw a circle, then cut out the screen. It fits good. I soak the seeds overnight, pour off the water and rinse twice a day. I set them on a towel on top of the refrigerator. I eat the radish and alfalfa sprouts raw and steam the mung, lentil, aduki and even pea sprouts. You can do soy sprouts and onion sprouts too. Your local co-op has all kinds of sprouting seeds and lentils can be had anywhere. Sprouts are cheap, even if you have to pay a lot for the seeds, since you get so many pounds of sprouts from a single pound of seeds. Don't buy too much at the store the first time, as they go a long way. I usually cover the bottom of the jar by way of measuring. You will be amazed at how fast they grow and how much they increase. Even though we have fresh vegetables year-round on the farm, I still have to have my sprouts in the winter.

If you are like me, you have storage potatoes that are starting to sprout and you are already eating potatoes at least once a day. Don't get me wrong; I never met a potato I didn't like, but I have so much left over! How to store more for later use? What I am doing now is experimenting with dried potatoes. Here's what I do. I peel the potatoes, slice as thin as possible, blanch for 5 minutes (and I am not talking about a character from a Tennessee Williams play here) and plunge in cold water for 5 minutes. I then let them drain and dry them in my electric dryer for 4 hours at 135 degrees. Depending on how thin I cut them, the slices are quite "snappy" or thick and not dry enough. However, the crisp ones can be bagged up and the thicker ones eaten right away. They are quite delicious and go like hotcakes at the local brewpub in Ferndale where I hang out on Wednesday nights. These dried potatoes do not have any oil, so are quite healthful. They have natural vegetable salts in them and I like them without added salt. However, it is easy to put them in a bag with a pinch of salt and just shake them up. Voila - natural dried chips! Okay, now for the bad news. 5 pounds of potatoes produces about 3 pounds of peeled potatoes and this produces 1 pound of dried potatoes. The labor involved is about an hour. So . . . 5 pounds at $1.50 per pound and an hour of labor at $10 per hour and an extra 10% for overhead (stove gas, electricity) comes to $19.25 per pound of dried chips. Certainly not a value-added product for commercial production, but they do taste good.