A Seattle area reader alerts me to Michael Pollan's praise of "Crunchy Cons" on a public radio talk show yesterday. Listen to the whole show here. At the 11 minute mark, Pollan talks about how the sustainable, organic agriculture movement needs not to write off conservatives, and should make common cause with that part of the conservative spectrum committed to good food, sustainable agriculture, homeschooling and -- as it happens -- faith. Says Pollan: "I really think it's important that people in this movement reach out to the Right, and get them on board."
Mark Musick, the reader who put me onto this interview, writes that he really appreciates the nod Pollan gave to the role of religious folks in the local food and farming community. Mark was one of the founders of the Washington Tilth Association, an organization that sprang up in the 1970s after Wendell Berry visited Spokane. From Mark's brief history of the organization:
The people who started the Tilth Association first met on July 1st, 1974 at a symposium in Spokane entitled "Agriculture for a Small Planet." One of the featured panelists was Kentucky farmer, poet and writer Wendell Berry, who spoke forcefully about the culture of agriculture.In his speech Berry described the loss of the traditional farm economy and the destruction of rural communities. He was blunt in detailing the impending collapse of rural America, and he linked the "drastic decline in the farm population" with "the growth of a vast, uprooted, dependent and unhappy urban population."
"Our urban and rural problems have largely caused each other," he said. "My point is that food is a cultural, not a technological product. A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its destruction invites calamity."
"If we allow another generation to pass without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden the possibility of strong agricultural communities, we will lose it altogether. And then" he concluded, "we will not only invoke calamity, we will deserve it."
These words had a profound impact on several of us attending symposium. A few days later, after returning to his home in Kentucky, Berry wrote a letter back to the new friends he met in Spokane. In it he said, "Your symposium... proves the existence of a thoughtful and even knowledgeable constituency for a better kind of agriculture....This constituency is as yet powerless," he added, "because it has no program. It has no coherent vision for what is possible."
"The crisis," Berry said, "is not in land use. It's in the lives and minds of land users. That's why I don't believe it can be helped very much by any official policy. Good land use is going to come either by hard necessity or by some kind of teaching....And so I'm asking you, from where you are, can you see any possibility of another kind of agricultural symposium...one that would try to bring together the various branches of agricultural dissidence and heresy?"
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
Lord Karth,
You might be surprised how well these two groups seemingly at odds with one another can and have worked together. I used to work for an organization that supported sustainable agriculture and although we (the staff) we more on the liberal end of the spectrum, most of our support came from very conservative individuals. I think it's a mistake to assume this is a one-sided fight. Also, I have seen the power of getting those two sides together on a single issue (or cluster of issues) and it was quite a powerful experience.
TX Sustainability @ 10:10 AM writes:
"I used to work for an organization that supported sustainable agriculture and although we (the staff) we more on the liberal end of the spectrum, most of our support came from very conservative individuals. I think it's a mistake to assume this is a one-sided fight. Also, I have seen the power of getting those two sides together on a single issue (or cluster of issues) and it was quite a powerful experience."
As I said, I'm willing to be educated.
Where was this organization located ? Was this a local or provincial-level group ? What was the nature of the support (financial ? PR ? Something else ?) And what sort of issue did these two sides get together on ? Speak more fully, if you please.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
In response to Lord Karth,
I agree there is a price disparity and there are several regulatory and grass roots educational initiatives that can help.
I raise pastured poultry and have my own processing building much like Joel Salatin's model (Pollan describes it in Omnivores Dilemna) So I will talk about the chicken end of the business.
I sell my chickens at about $3.75/lb -whole which is a bit more than Costco chickens I am sure. Industrial "Organic" whole chickens sell for $2.00/lb where I live, but are prolly a bit more in Pittsburgh- So lets say I am about 75%-100% more than the average chicken.
Educating Joe Sixpack: 1. I pay taxes, provide my own healthcare costs, put my money into the local economy. 2. Chickens get to be chickens, 3. no pollution from my farm 4. health benefits etc. 5. our food is cheap only because we pay farmers to lose money through tax subsidies - $10 billion farm bill is pretty expensive- and very socialistic if you ask me 6. Teach people about budgeting for food. Make good food a priority.
Regulations that would help: 1. STOP government subsidizing of Corn/soybeans that feed Tyson, purdue chickens. I pay full price to local farmers for my feed 2. Keep Illegal aliens out of the country- they are the ones doing the "farming"/slaughtering in terrible conditions. Properly documented and organized migrant workers are one thing, but how many really are? 3. Country of origin labeling 4. Local grants for Farmers market buildings open all year, 5. Easier for farmers to receive food stamps as payments at the market.
But in the end people need to realize that farmers deserve a decent wage for what they do. Is $5/hour a decent wage? I'd be happy with $10- and that's still a bit lower than my former wage as a stock broker. I would venture that an overwhelming majority of our meat/produce is being grown at under $1.00/hr wage around the world. How many Americans could work for that? If we could get our healthcare/legal help done by illegals stationed at Walmart would we buy it there? There's a law and Bar Association that requires licensing, maybe we need something like that for food... Or go the other way- remove all licensing requirements for MD's, CPA's, JD, brokers etc. That would open a can of worms!
Dave Chirico
West Liberty Farm
I've been living in Vienna the last several years - its a small country that I think can teach America a thing or two.
I haven't done the research to talk about hard numbers, but I would say that over half the food in your average mainstream Shop-rite type supermarket is organic, or "bio" as they call it here. Some organic things cost more (meat, eggs), but locally-produced fresh organic produce seems to be price-competitive with the non-organic stuff. Countries of origin are labelled.
This is normal life to Austrians, who actually tend to be quite conservative and yet see nothing political, let alone "liberal", about what they buy in the supermarket.
On average, I spend a bit more of my monthly paycheck on food than I did back in NYC, but not much more. I have less choices, and the biggest supermarket in this entire city is only a third the size of your average shop-rite, since there's much less of the processed "middle of the supermarket" junk. But the food I do buy tastes way better, and compared to America, I would say that my Austrian/German friends cook from scratch way more often and the idea of food being a non-trivial expense is normal. And the reason people tend to cook more is, I suspect, economic and not cultural. Without dirt-cheap raw ingredients (soy, corn, etc.), there are far fewer dehydrated/frozen/nukeable "meal-in-a-box" choices here, and thus its much more economical to cook from real ingredients.
I really don't see what, other than the entrenched large agribusiness, is keeping America from being more like Austria. Especially considering the fact that America has way more high-quality farmland than this little country.
Just my anecdotal experience.
Thanks, everyone, for the very interesting comments on this nice blog. I'm a full-time farmer much like Dave. I came to farming from a former lifestyle of total consumerism. I'm now what's called a "sustainable" farmer. I profess an orthodox (small "o") Christian faith, have a rifle and a shotgun (which I think the government shouldn't concern itself with in any way at all), will probably wind up homeschooling, sympathize mostly with the Southern cause in the War for Southern Independence, etc. I theoretically try to price my farm goods so as to make $10/hour, but by the time theory meets reality my wife and I combined wind up earning $10-15,000/year (plus a lot of food for ourselves) for full-time work. That's enough, though, and I take offense when our rich but simple lifestyle is denigrated as "poverty."
Anyways, I think Lord Karth makes a very valid, fundamental point. Elitism and sustainability are most fundamentally mortal enemies. At the same time I can't deny that the leading supporters of my farm are very wealthy elites (even by inflated American standards). My prices, particularly for produce, are pretty much in line with prices for fresh produce at low-end supermarkets, but that really hasn't made a difference in my customer base. There are a few $25-50,000/year households that really support us, but my failure to attract customers that choose to live modestly (even by inflated American standards) seems to indicate that what my farm-business model is part of a social fad as opposed to any nascent agricultural revolution. Of course, that doesn't please me.
I also lived in Austria for a year, by the way. The last statistic I heard was that Austria led (or was second behind Belgium) with something like 11% of agriculture being organic (as opposed to the 80%, but of course, there are all sorts of ways to phrase statistics: % of dollars, % of land, % of narrowly defined food items, etc.) I don't believe Austria is very food-independent, though, so you'd really need to look outside Austria's borders to see what kind of agriculture it lives from. I also believe your 50% "bio" figure in grocery stores is a misperception. Perhaps you could do a simple, semi-scientific survey and report back. I know there's more organic stuff in a regular Austrian supermarket than in the U.S., but you can be sure it's the non-working classes that are buying "bio" in Austria. Go to some working-class district like the 21st and see what you find in a grocery store there.
And to be fair, Dave, tell us where the nitrogen that forms the building blocks of your chicken meat came from. Synthetic fertilizers, same as mine, right? Are they eating genetically modified grains, too? It's extremely difficult to raise animal's without genetically modified feeds any more, not unless you go with certified organic feeds, which would wipe out all the profit of someone like Salatin. I have yet to meet a farmer (or hear a credible report of a single farmer) in the US that really makes a living farming, however modest, that isn't deeply connected to our whole system of fossil fuel-powered machinery, fossil fuel-based fertility, fossil fuel-based distribution/transport, etc., etc. The US is just a long, long way from any kind of real sustainability, and very few of us "sustainable" farmers are living in a substantially alternative economy. I believe you, Dave, are doing what you can, though, and I'd probably buy from you if I were living in Pittsburgh. I think we should be careful not to set our goals too low, though, nor to deny the kind of radicalism that our agrarian/sustainable/eco-friendly understanding of the world really calls for. If we were approaching real sustainability, I think we would be finding much, much less common ground with the elites that supporting us now. While sustainable farming remains marginal in so many ways, we can avoid a lot of the hard realities. That's to our advantage for the time being, but it's not "sustainable."
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.