From California to the Midwest, examining the perils of industrial farming and the risk to food
Two regions dominate U.S. agriculture — California’s Central Valley and the former prairielands of the Midwest. In both places, the massive scale of industrial farming is accelerating an alarming ecological decline. In his new book, journalist and former farmer Tom Philpott examines ways to make farming more sustainable for years to come. The following is an excerpt from “Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It.” Click the audio player above to hear Philpott’s conversation with Kai Ryssdal.
Salad greens love an autumn chill. It concentrates their flavor, making them peppery but also sweet. And cold weather beats back the insect pests that besiege these tender leaves in warm months.
To cut delicate greens on frosty mornings, you can wear gloves, but for dexterity’s sake, they have to be the kind that leaves the fingers bare. Each day when you start out, your fingers take on a stinging chill. We had a joke at the small organic farm in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina where I worked in the early 2000s: when the pain has finally eased because your fingers have gone completely numb, you know you’re halfway through the morning’s harvest.
The daily ache was worth it. The farm cultivated broccoli, chard, beets, potatoes, squash, green beans, and more; but fall salad greens were the crown jewel. Spinach, young kale, arugula, and a variety of spicy mustards were its lifeblood, its claim to fame. You don’t have to take my word for it. After a visit in 2005, the food writer Jim Leff, founder of the website Chowhound, called them “hallucinogenic in their intensity and persistence of flavor; coated with a dab of oil and vinegar, they steal every meal they accompany.”
My years on the farm were a crash course in some of the challenges and paradoxes facing U.S. agriculture, and those prize salad greens figured in one memorable lesson.
One chilly afternoon, late in fall 2006, I was in the farmhouse calling restaurant chefs to take their delivery orders, a key part of our business. I reached the chef of a much-loved local restaurant, a reliable customer. On our call, he ordered his usual amounts of other fall goods: garlic, beets, mature chard. The conversation turned to salad greens, which he had been buying from us in large quantities for years. This time, he stopped short: “I hate to ask, but can you go down on price?” He explained that his food distributor had just begun offering organic salad greens shipped from California. “They’re pretty good quality. Not nearly as good as yours, but not bad either—and they’re less than half the price.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/26/us-farming-agriculture-food-supply-danger
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Dr. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned scholar and tireless crusader for economic, food, and gender justice. Dr. Shiva was trained as a physicist, and later shifted her focus to interdisciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy. In 1982, she founded an independent institute, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, which was dedicated to high quality and independent research to address the most significant ecological and social issues of our times in close partnership with local communities and social movements. In 1991, she founded Navdanya, a national movement in India to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, and to promote organic farming and fair trade. In 2004, in collaboration with Schumacher College, U.K., she started Bija Vidyapeeth (Earth University), an international college for sustainable living in the Doon Valley in Northern India. Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an environmental “hero” in 2003 and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia. Forbes magazine in November 2010 identified Dr. Vandana Shiva as one of the top Seven most Powerful Women on the Globe. Among her many awards are the Alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award, 1993), Order of the Golden Ark, the UN’s Global 500 Roll of Honour, and The MIDORI Prize for Biodiversity in 2016
The second path is the industrial path based on fossil fuels and poisons. This path is the path of death. It goes against the principles of nature and life. It violates the principle of diversity and imposes monocultures and uniformity. It violates the principle of giving back and extracts from nature and farmers, disrupting ecological sustainability and social justice. It is the path to biodiversity extinction and climate catastrophe, of destruction of small farms and displacement of farmers, and the spread of hunger, malnutrition and chronic diseases. Walking further and faster down the path of extinction is not an intelligent choice
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