#211677 - 11/21/10 03:12 AM
Re: Sustainable Local Food and Farm Conference
[Re: Susan]
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Addict
Registered: 03/20/05
Posts: 410
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I guess it depends on where you're standing. The costs of unsustainable chemical growing and confined animal operations are increasing daily, and those are just the visible costs. The hidden costs are even more astronomical.
But if/when this country crashes, who can afford to pay for all those chemicals? The 1000-acre farmers who are living on the edge now, heavily dependent on their government (taxpayer-paid) subsidies? I don't think so. And the soil on those farms is dead, it's just something to hold down the roots so the plants don't fall over. If you think that all those farms can go organic overnight, think again.
And what about delivery? Do you know where your food comes from, if it even comes from somewhere in the U.S.?
Let's just look at some staple foods that keep at least relatively well:
Dried beans come mostly from ND, MI, NE, MN, ID, CA, CO.
Potatoes mostly come from ID, WA, WI, ND
Wheat comes from KS, ND, MT, OK, WA, TX, SD
Rice comes from AR (by far), CA, LA, MS, TX , MO
Squash and sweet potatoes mostly come from the south: FL, GA, TX, NC, OK
Milk & Dairy products: CA (about 1.5 times WI), WI, NY,
PA, ID, MN
Apples: WA, NY, MI, PA, CA
How many of those things are grown near you? Does anyone notice a pattern of where most of the food comes from? Are you confident that even your most basic far-off, low-nutrient, chemically-tainted food is actually going to show up twice weekly in your grocery stores?
Okay, how about your local farms? How many don't depend on the petrochemical industry? Do you think they can feed everyone in your area?
At the time of the Great Depression, there were more than six million farms scattered over American. Today, there are less than two million, they're far more centralized, and only about 160,000 of them are producing a high percentage of our food. Too much rain? Not enough? Disease attack? Pest attack? Crop failure? Just too bad, I guess.
If there is a great crash (maybe we can call it the Greater Depression), it's going to interfere with everything that our food supply depends on: chemical fertilizers, fuel for harvesting, power for processing, fuel for delivery. If we lose power (even intermittently and in random places), that will disrupt the internet and the logistics of delivery. Power losses will cause spoilage.
Can you imagine today's spoiled brats (of all ages) dumped into the conditions of the 1930s?
Check into your local CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture) and see if there's anything you can do to help. Learn to garden.
Frankly, the whole possible scenario scares the 'ell out of me!
Sue
Where do I start? Most of your premises are flat out WRONG. The land is NOT used up, chemical growing, what does that mean? 1000 acre farmers? Most of my family subsist on 1/4 sections. But you probably don't even know what that means. Don't worry, they don't WANT to go organic - which is a very mis-used term anyway. Low-nutrient, chemically tainted - hey, that sounds like organic food! You go ahead and worry, we will continue to feed ourselves and our towns, like we have done for the past hundred years.
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#211816 - 11/23/10 06:10 AM
Re: Sustainable Local Food and Farm Conference
[Re: sodak]
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Journeyman
Registered: 01/30/08
Posts: 61
Loc: Sierra Foothills, Nor Cal
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Sodak, I am sorry you have the opinions that you do.
This is not some event meant to anger the average person's opinion of the industrial food complex. It is literally about what the title states : Sustainable Local Food
The average item in a grocery store travels some 1200 miles - often due to ridiculous logistics of the supply chain (Whole Foods will buy flowers from the state of Washington, ship them to their warehouse in California, then transport them back to Washington to place in their stores).
Wouldn't it be much better for a community to grow their own foods locally? Eat seasonally? Cooking meals from produce picked that day within 5 or 10 miles of their home? Eat meat that has never left their county?
My wife and I grow and raise as much of our own food as we can (pork, beef, poultry/eggs, vegetables, fruits)and share with friends and neighbors. We wouldn't have it any other way.
Mono-cultures are disasters waiting to happen. Whether you have Roundup Ready soy beans, Confined Animal Feed Operations, or 1st graders jammed into an overheated, under ventilated class room - when sickness or disease enters that environment it adversely effects all in that paradigm, then, all in arms reach.
It's admirable that your family farms on 160 acres of land, and yes! Organic has been brutally watered down and muddied - mostly by large scale commercial operations cashing in on a catch word.
Sue is dead on the mark in her posts on this thread. We do live in the most agriculturally illiterate society ever in the history of civilization. Society has gone from growing and cooking most of their own food, to, well...cooking most of their own food, to ... heating prepared meals in a microwave and eating fast food as the bulk of their diets.
This conference is intended to get our local farming community motivated to reach out to the average consumer AND to get the average consumer to pay attention to where their food comes from: Who grew it?, and how did it get to my store?
You should be proud of what you and your family have achieved as an agricultural producer - for what sounds like many generations. How would you feel if your dominant crop faced competition that was suddenly coming in from over seas crashing the price of your crop? Wouldn't you be telling your neighbors to stop buying the imports and telling them why they should be buying your crops over the imports?
I wish you well.
Dennis
_________________________
While I have long believed that I will never get old, I have come to the realization that sooner or later there will be more people younger than me.
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#211827 - 11/23/10 01:33 PM
Re: Sustainable Local Food and Farm Conference
[Re: NorCalDennis]
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Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 08/03/07
Posts: 3078
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Sue is dead on the mark in her posts on this thread. We do live in the most agriculturally illiterate society ever in the history of civilization. This is very true, most of the city folks are extremely agriculturally illiterate. This was the case with the home grown Swiss spaghetti crop during the 1950s. Most folks have never heard of the Swiss spaghetti harvest (mostly locally grown crop) where the delicious spagetti could be eaten straight from the tree before being dried out for storage. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMNO2Kcvz2kAll we have now is the mass produced dried synthetic variety of the chemically enhanced spaghetti mostly produced in Italy. Education is the key. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGYs4KS_djg
Edited by Am_Fear_Liath_Mor (11/23/10 01:37 PM)
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#211828 - 11/23/10 01:36 PM
Re: Sustainable Local Food and Farm Conference
[Re: NorCalDennis]
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Old Hand
Registered: 03/24/06
Posts: 900
Loc: NW NJ
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Let me step in here to say that if, for whatever reason, you prefer to eat expensive food that is grown with inefficient, primitive methods you’re welcome to do so. If you wish to encourage others to do so, that’s fine too.
But I think there’s an overly romantic (yes, I’m calling Cynical Sue a romanticist) view of the past, sometimes. When we were living in caves, all our food was organic and grown locally. Not that we had much food, or lived very long. The neat thing about industrialization is that it enables us to afford the luxury of being picky about where our food comes from.
As an aside: From watching Little House on the Prairie, I learned several things about the old days. For one, every year Pa would bust his back all summer raising a crop, only to have it wiped out by a hail storm just before harvest. He’d then go out and get a job hauling nitroglycerine for the railroad and make enough money in a single week to get them through the winter. I also learned that a hurricane lantern is not used for illumination; it is an incendiary device that only appears when a barn is about to burn down.
_________________________
- Tom S.
"Never trust and engineer who doesn't carry a pocketknife."
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#211830 - 11/23/10 01:48 PM
Re: Sustainable Local Food and Farm Conference
[Re: thseng]
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Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 08/03/07
Posts: 3078
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yes, I’m calling Cynical Sue a romanticist Perhaps a futurist would be more appropriate The neat thing about industrialization is that it enables us to afford the luxury of being picky about where our food comes from. With 10 calories of petrol chemical energy required to produce 1 calorie of food energy (not even taking the solar energy input due to photosynthesis, from producer to the mouth, into account) then this graph should scare the c*ap out of you, because it scares the c*ap out of me.  Remember how skinny folks were back in the 1970s 
Edited by Am_Fear_Liath_Mor (11/23/10 01:53 PM)
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#211835 - 11/23/10 04:18 PM
Re: Sustainable Local Food and Farm Conference
[Re: thseng]
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Geezer
Registered: 01/21/04
Posts: 5163
Loc: W. WA
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"The neat thing about industrialization is that it enables us to afford the luxury of being picky about where our food comes from." Only if it's available. That's not what I'm talking about here. If we have an economic crash, our lives are going to be turned upside down. If suppliers bust their butts getting food to us, it's not going to be Twinkies, HoHos, $6 frozen TV dinners and goumet means for one. And why some people think that organic produces less than chemical farming apparently haven't been paying attention to the real world. Old Grey Man: send me some seeds for that spaghetti tree. The ones I've been using apparently only germinate in the Mediterranean climate. Please send the ones in the O shape -- they take up less soil space than the ones that come in the ______________________________________________________ shape. Thanks!  Sue
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#211841 - 11/23/10 06:49 PM
Re: Sustainable Local Food and Farm Conference
[Re: MartinFocazio]
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INTERCEPTOR
Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 07/15/02
Posts: 3760
Loc: TX
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My point is that "sustainable" means "durable" - even in the face of externalities. Quoted for truth but the above statement always seems to get lost in belief shouting matches. I run into this all the time with people in my work with Food Everywhere: Houston. Some people demand everything be done caveman-style, others want ultra-technical mega-production. Both sides seem to forget that the program was started strictly to produce the most amount of food possible in a way that will work even when trucks don't. Just to throw my 2-cents in. A big part of sustainable agriculture involves knowing what plants to grow in a particular location. Taken to extremes you end up with our current giant monoculture farms which are amazingly cost effective and energy effcient at this time. Houston's climate is not very good for apples but people expect to be able to buy apples so they are trucked in. If you want to stick to crops grown locally in a sustainable manner then you need to lower your expectations some about diversity of your food. Killing a bunch of your neighbors would also help.  -Blast
Edited by Blast (11/23/10 06:50 PM)
Edit Reason: verb-tense correction
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