Sustainable WNC

I was asked to do a short presentation for the Environmental Educators of North Carolina conference on October 27, 2007 in the form of a “this I believe” statement. Here’s what I said:

I believe that what we choose to eat is important and can be one of the most effective and significant actions we can take to clean up the environment, protect our landscape and rural culture, and improve human health. It is a choice we can make three times a day that can have immediate and profound effects. It is a choice more and more people are making that has now become a local food movement to take back control of what we consume by becoming more mindful eaters.

Eating used to be intimately connected to farming. There was a time, not so long ago, when everyone knew where their food came from and trusted that their neighbor farmers would provide them with safe and nutritious food that strengthened local economies and did not pollute the community or exploit workers.

In the last half century, to the detriment of farmers all over the world, food has been treated as just another industrial product to be freely traded in a global market. This has removed farming, and its connection to the food that we eat, from most of our lives. Most of us no longer have any knowledge of where our food comes from, how it is grown, or who grows it. This leaves us impoverished, vulnerable, and disconnected from one of the most important things we do every day.

Today, Americans pay less for food than anyone in the world. We also have the greatest abundance of food choices in human history available to us. If our only goal is extremely cheap food that is widely available then our current food system is a triumph. If our goal, on the other hand, is human and environmental health, social justice, and strong local economies, it has been a terrible failure.

Now we are in danger of losing most of our farms in America. In the last century we moved from being a nation of a majority of farmers to one with less than 2% of the population in agriculture. Today there are more people in prison than there are people claiming farming as an occupation. The logic of a system that strives to produce food for the cheapest cost possible is for farm production to completely move out of this country to areas with more relaxed labor and environmental regulations.

Because the food system today is so hidden and disconnected from the act of eating, we all end up supporting a system that we would reject if it were made more visible. That’s where the local food movement comes in. It is a movement to make the invisible food system visible and accountable. It is about making eating decisions based on knowledge and values.

The ideals of this country were founded on the independence that came from being connected to food and farming. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a community of engaged farmers, free from outside influence and able to act independently. Because they owned their livelihood, citizens could make decision based on the good of the community. He wrote in 1785 that “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independant, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to it’s liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”

Needless to say things did not turn out exactly like Jefferson envisioned. During Jefferson’s time most Americans were farmers. Today North Carolina has the dubious distinction of leading the nation in the loss of farmers.

What we have evolved into is a country of consumers. As consumers we have lost our connection to food and farms and with that loss of connection we have lost some of our liberty. Because we no longer have connections with food and farms we end up supporting an agriculture industry that is harming the land, turning animals into industrial inputs, and destroying rural communities.

The local food movement, I believe, is an important and fundamental step in regaining our independence and taking back control. As eaters we do have power. Every day when we decide what food we are going to eat we are making a decision about our rural landscape and culture, our health, and the fate of our family farms.

Local food is one of the hottest topics in the country right now. From people wanting to reconnect to community and enjoy fresher foods to those concerned with energy-use to people who don’t trust our food coming from far off countries, local food is being looked to for the answers. As a grass roots movement the shift to local food is radically democratic. It places the choice of what foods to eat and how the food is grown directly in the hands of the individual making the decision on what to buy for dinner. It is also a subversive movement, one that rejects the messages from the multi-national food corporations that we should be unconcerned about where our food comes from or how it is grown. “Just shut up and eat” they say. The local food activist (that being anyone who cares enough to make sure they know where their food comes from) says “I’ll put my money where my mouth is and buy my food from my local farmer.”

The demand for local has not gone unnoticed by the food marketers. Go to any chain grocery store these days and the produce department overflows with signs saying “local.” Great right? Now you can get local right at your local grocery store. But what do they mean by “local” you might ask and who has made the definition? As it happens “local” as a marketing term has no legal meaning. The truth is that the only one deciding what is called local at the store is the store itself. You might think they have an interest, given the high customer demand for local, in defining local in a way that gets them the most “local” produce possible. It would be great if these stores changed their buying habits to include more local, unfortunately it looks like all they have done is changed their signage.

For most people local means in the county or within a short drive. It might mean from a particular geographic area like the Catskills or the Southern Appalachians. A number of people who are fervently into the local food scene define local as within 100 miles. Most of our grocer friends, however, are defining local much more expansively. One grocery chain proclaims in large letters “Fresh Local Produce” on all of their signs and bags. In very small print (I had to use a magnifying glass on their newspaper ad) it says “Southeastern.” The entire Southeast is local? That could be one quarter of the country! I can think of no one who would claim farms that could be one thousand miles from their home are local. 500 miles would be ridiculous. But that is what your local store is trying to sell you when they put the word “local” over their produce.

Do they think we are stupid? Yea, kinda. They assume we will not look at the fine print, that we will not ask questions like “what is the name of the farmer” or “where is this local farm located?”

So what can you do? All you want is to support local farms and eat fresh foods and your local grocer is only making it more complicated, not simpler, through their claims of “local.” The first thing is to ask the produce manager how they define local and then let them know that you want real local, food that comes from a farm that is in your area, somewhere you could drive to and back in a day if you wanted to see the farm. In the southern Appalachians you can tell your produce manager that you want food from the farms that make up your scenic landscape, that are your neighbors, that are local enough to visit. Remember to be polite, your produce manager probably wants the same thing you want, they don’t make the decisions on what the corporation calls local. They can give the home office your feedback though.

What do you do if, when you ask for food from a local Appalachian farm, your produce manager says “they don’t produce enough here to meet our needs?” You reply politely “you mean that western North Carolina’s 12,212 farms, farms that produce over fifty different fruits and vegetables on 1,056,566 acres, can’t produce enough for your store?” or you could just give them a knowing look and depart for a store more responsive to your desires for local.

The one sure way, of course, to make sure you are getting true locally-grown food is to purchase direct from the farmer. The Southern Appalachian region has dozens of farmers tailgate markets, almost one in every county with some counties having several. U-pick farms and roadside stands dot the landscape. You can join a CSA – Community Supported Agriculture – farm and enjoy a weekly box of fresh from the farm seasonal produce. And when you shop at the grocery store you can look for the Appalachian Grown logo. Appalachian Grown local comes only from family farms that are located in Appalachian counties that are within 100 miles of Asheville. Currently over 120 farms are certified Appalachian Grown and their products are available in many grocery stores throughout the region.

The southern Appalachians are one of the most scenically beautiful places on earth. We also have a wonderfully moderate climate and distinct seasons that make every time of the year unique and rarely unpleasant. The moderate climate and rich soils make it a region of astoundingly diverse agricultural production. For generations family farms in the southern Appalachians have grown and delivered to market hundreds of different agricultural products while maintaining the picturesque landscape and vibrant rural communities. Today, the beauty of the landscape and desirable climate are coming into conflict with the farms that occupy the land. People want to live here and the price they are willing to pay for the land far exceeds the revenues that can be generated from the land through farming.

The beauty or the land can be used to preserve our farmland. Tourism is the number one industry in the region. Western North Carolina alone attracts over 21 million visitors annually. After spending the day admiring the scenic landscape of farms and forests these visitors spend around $400 million on food. If even a small percentage of this money was spent on local food it would go a long way to making farms more economically sustainable and thus better able to resist the necessity of selling off land for development.

This year, in addition to the 100,000 Local Food Guides (on line at AppalachianGrown.org), ASAP will be printing 150,000 Local Food Maps. These maps will list hundreds of farms to visit, restaurants to dine at, grocery stores to get picnic supplies, and other locations that carry local food. Now visitors can come to the mountains and “eat the landscape.” They can make informed decisions about where to shop and visit that help maintain the landscape of farms. This region is rich in the heritage of our farms and rural communities and people visit here for that reason. We need to support these farms and communities by supporting their livelihoods.

What do we stand to lose if we let our farms disappear? In western North Carolina one third of the privately-owned land (one fourth of the total land) is in farms. Imagine a landscape where that much land is converted to development. And we also stand to lose a large percentage of the multi-billion dollar overall tourist spending. My other posts go into more detail on the other thousands of things we lose if we lose farms, but it is important to note that a large percentage of the scenic landscape of the region receives little of the money spent by people enjoying the view.

Farmers tailgate markets are now open all over western North Carolina and in Appalachian counties of bordering states. These are the seasonal markets where farmers gather every year during the growing season to sell their produce and other farm products right out of the back – or tailgate- of their trucks. There are over three dozen of these markets in the region and many have been around for decades and attract a loyal following. If you have never been to one of these markets you owe it to yourself to go. You will find there some of the friendliest people around selling everything from the most common vegetables to exotic new varieties to artisan goat cheese and wood-fired oven baked breads to grass-fed meats and more. There is often music and lots of fresh baked goods. The air is festive and will remind you that these kinds of markets are the birthplaces of civilization, the crossroads of trade where cities were born.

Every year the Local Food Guide goes to great lengths to get the most up to date information on these markets. Starting in January emails go out to all the contacts from the year before. A few of them update all of their information then – making changes to the hours or days of the week the market is open as well as the opening date and other important information. After a couple of emails all of the remaining markets are called, and then called again and again. Aimee, who has worked on the Local Food Guide for the last two years, takes down all of the information from the markets she can reach on the phone and then checks them off the list. Many of the contacts tell her they are no longer the manager and give her new leads. Some of the phones are disconnected. By late February, a few months out from publishing the Guide, and half of the markets may not have updated their information or a contact may not have even been found yet.

Aimee then starts calling Extension offices, chambers of commerce, visitor’s centers, and anyone else she can to track down lost markets. What happens is that every year some of the markets change who their contact person is, move across town, change the day of the week they are open, or close down entirely. Most of the time it is just a change in the contact person and just requires diligence to track down the new contact. Because almost all of the markets are self-run and managed by volunteers there is no single place in the community that stores the information about the markets. That’s where Aimee’s detective work comes in. For the Local Food Guide she does not give up on getting the most up to date and accurate information about a communities market until someone convinces her that the market is no longer operating.

As it turns out Aimee sells at a market here in Asheville so understands firsthand the value of having accurate information so that her customers are sure to find her. This year there will be 100,000 Local Food Guides distributed in hundreds of locations throughout the region. There will also be a companion 150,000 Local Food Maps this year that will show locations for all of the markets. All of this is also on the web with weekly “fresh at the market” updates at www.AppalachianGrown.org.

It looks like the damage caused by the Easter weekend freeze (followed by damaging winds) will be as bad or worse than first predicted. The current state wide estimate is in the neighborhood of $112 million in direct losses (this will likely rise). This does not account for all associated losses to farm suppliers and other businesses that depend on farmers. It also does not account for tourist dollars lost to communities like Henderson County where many tourists travel in the fall to pick apples.

Governor Easley was in Asheville yesterday (April 20). He met with farmers and let them know that he has asked the US Department of Agriculture to have 56 NC counties designated federal disaster areas. This designation would bring some relief to farmers but many of them will feel the effects of this for years to come. Some may never recover.

WNC counties that are in the proposed disaster area are Avery, Buncombe, Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Macon, Madison, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Swain, Transylvania, and Watauga.

Our local Extension agents have been hard at work helping farmers asses their damage, making them aware of their options, and preparing them for the coming season. Other groups have also been working overtime to help our farmers. They all deserve our thanks.

Next Thursday evening (April 26) there will be an informational meeting for growers looking for alternative crops for 2007. The meeting is sponsored by the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, NC State University, and NC Cooperative Extension. The meeting will be from 6 to 8 pm at the Mountain Horticultural Crops Research & Extension Center, 455 Research Drive, Fletcher, NC 28732. Call Diane Ducharme at 828-697-4891 for more information.

Dealing with the weather is a constant activity for farmers. Every year they must deal with everything from droughts to floods, scorching sun or freezing temperatures. One way that farmers deal with the risks of farming is to diversify so that if one crop fails, they have something else that does well and they can make it through another year. Some crops are harder than others to diversify and harder to recover from damage caused by extremes of weather. This past weekend it looks like some of our Appalachian farmers, our neighbors and food providers, may have lost most of their crop for this year. This week farmers throughout our region are assessing the damage done by the one-two punch of an unseasonably warm period followed by the Easter weekend freeze.

The hardest hit farms are those that are growing fruits and berries. In Henderson County alone several hundred family farms and 5,000 acres of apples will be impacted. Reading the Hendersonville News (Cold dooms crop) and the Greenville Times (Cold decimates peach crop) leaves me asking what I can do to help. I don’t have a good answer. I know that seeking out local when I shop for food helps farmers. In the long run it is the most important thing we can do to make sure we keep local farms. For today I will keep my fingers crossed that the damage is not as bad as feared and I will let my neighbor farmers know that we appreciate and support what they do.

Reason 453 – The high cost of cheap food

Americans pay less for food than anyone in the world. We also have the greatest abundance of food choices in human history available to us. To the extent that our goal is extremely cheap food that is widely available our current food system is a triumph.

But this cheap food comes at a high, although mostly hidden, cost. Over the last half century food production has consolidated into fewer and fewer hands and taken on an industrial model of production. The goal of industrial food producers today is to have all types of foods be exactly the same no matter where they are grown or who grows them. They want lettuce grown in California to be exactly the same as lettuce grown in North Carolina that is exactly the same as lettuce grown in Mexico. To do this they have consolidated production into larger farms and centralized processing. This creates economies of scale so that food production can be increasingly mechanized and chemicalized to create a perfectly uniform food product at the cheapest consumer cost possible.

A couple of recent news items illustrate the high cost we pay for this homogenization of food and emphasis on cheapness over any other quality. They all deal with the social cost of production inherent in this de-personalized industrial food system. Drawing on the lessons from other industries, the food industry is able to externalize many of the environmental and social costs of delivering their food products to the market. Three recent news items paint a harsh picture of the costs society actually pays for cheap food.

Last week the FDA released their final report on the 2006 E. coli outbreak in spinach. For anyone who missed it, last season 205 people in 26 states became ill and three died from eating spinach contaminated with a particularly virulent strain of E. coli. Because the bagging plant in California was large and processed spinach from many farms and marketed them under more than two dozen brands authorities were hampered in identifying the location of the outbreak. The ultimate cause of the contamination according to the recently released FDA report? Unknown. The cause of the extent of the outbreak and the inability of health of officials to stop the outbreak before it sickened and killed people was the consolidation of so much food production and distribution in a single place. In order to deliver cheap and uniform spinach to people all over the United States food companies set up giant factories to process, bag, and ship their products nation-wide. As consumers we get an inexpensive food product that is the same from bag to bag and somewhat resembles fresh spinach grown by a local farm. Because the connection between farming and food is so removed from our lives and because food companies and grocers spend so much money and effort in making us believe that checkout counter price is our only consideration, we end up supporting a system that allows these deaths to happen. The price at the super market is cheap, but as a society we pay an extremely high price in lives and illness, not to mention the costs incurred in the investigation.

Another recent issue that points out the costs paid for removing food production from view and only considering the cheap check-out line costs is the pet food poisoning that came to light last month. In this case pets around the country were getting sick and dying. On March 16 Menu Foods, a Canadian pet food manufacturer, began recalling pet foods manufactured at their facilities. In all over 90 different brands of pet food were affected. The culprit? Aminopterin, a rodenticide used for pest control purposes that is currently not allowed in the United States. How did a chemical used in rat poison end up in so much pet food spread over a large portion of the country? Cheap food, this time pet food. The reasons are the same as in the spinach case. Food is no longer treated as something that nurtures and sustains us but as an industrial product that can mix ingredients from all over the world to create uniform products at the lowest possible cost. The price? Cheap pet food at the check-out but social costs to society in the death of pets and the fear of not knowing whether the food you are serving to your dog or cat may kill them.

The last recent example is cheap pork. North Carolina is the second-largest swine-producing state, and our hog farms dump 13 million pounds of waste a day into the open-air pits. Hog farming, as with much of the meat industry, is heavily vertically integrated and consolidated. This means that a few companies produce much of the meat available in grocery stores and they own most of the process – from feed to finished product. They have industrialized the industry to such an extent that there are very few small farms left today that can make a living from farm animals.

I won’t go into the horrors of conditions for animals and workers in these confined animal feedlot operations (CAFOs), but both are treated as inputs into an industrial process designed to turn out cheap uniform product. The costs? Again we get cheap food at the check-out but the externalized costs are very high.

In 1995, an eight-acre animal waste lagoon in North Carolina burst, spilling 25 million gallons of animal waste into the New River, killing 10 million fish and closing 364,000 acres of coastal wetlands to shellfishing. This is just one example. Why was this allowed to happen? Because it is cheaper to keep thousands of hogs in a small area, ship in feed from across the country, and process the meat in a large factory. This confinement creates the large amounts of concentrated waste that flow into lagoons (and on occasion into public waterways). Because we have been conditioned to expect extremely cheap pork and because this production is hidden behind walls in far off counties, we end up supporting a system we would otherwise reject. We also end up supporting this factory farming through our tax dollars.

What makes this news is that in 1997 NC placed a moratorium on the construction of new hog lagoons. This has had the effect of slowing the expansion of the hog industry but it has done nothing to clean up existing “farms.” Recently bills have been filled in the NC House to extend the moratorium for another 3 years (it has already been extended 4 times). This bill would block new lagoons but ask the tax payers to foot the bill for helping to find a cleaner way to deal with the concentrated wastes (to the tune of $50 million). These are all costs that are not paid for at the check-out line, that are hidden from the view of the consumer, and costs us all in polluted waterways, hidden subsidies, and a food system that turns animals into industrial inputs.

There are, of course, alternatives. We could, and should, demand that the costs of production for industrial foods be fully reflected in their check-out line costs. This would give our local family farmers a level playing field. Still, given all the supports that industrial “farms” get, our local farmers manage to stay pretty competitive on price, but without laying a heavy burden on society. In fact they bring many benefits (at least 1001 which I will layout through this blog). All they ask is that you make the effort to seek them out and support responsible farming when you buy food. As always, find local markets and farms in the Local Food Guide – online at www.AppalachianGrown.org

For this blog I will write about the local food movement and food from the perspective of the farm, rural communities, policy, and the environment. Eating is something that we all do every day and it can bring great pleasure to our lives. Eating also has a tremendous impact on our land, our communities, our health, and the environment. For too long the realities of food production have been hidden from view. As the percentage of the population that farms dwindles, most of us now have little connection with where and how our food is grown. This disconnect leaves us impoverished. The local food movement is about reversing the disconnect between food and how and where it is grown. It is an empowerment movement that gives everyone who eats the opportunity to take back control of one of the most important things they do every day.

We are in danger of losing most of our farms in America. In the last century we moved from being a nation of a majority of farmers to one with less than 2% of the population in agriculture. Today there more people in prison than there are people claiming farming as an occupation. Trends continuing today are in consolidation of farm land as the number of farms decreases. Farm labor has been replaced by machinery and chemicals. The logic of a system that strives to produce food for the cheapest cost possible is for farm production to move out of this country to areas with more relaxed labor and environmental regulations. Because the food system today is so hidden and disconnected from the act of eating, we all end up supporting a system that we would reject if it were made more visible. That’s what this movement is about.

Agriculture is very unique to place. Here in Western NC and the southern Appalachians we have very particular conditions that require local solutions. WNC is the home to over 12,000 farms, ¼ of the total farms in NC yet we only have 1/9 the population. Because of our geographic conditions our farms are smaller, one half the average state size and less than ¼ the national average.

At the founding of this nation Thomas Jefferson envisioned a community of engaged farmers, free from outside influence and able to act independently. Because they owned their livelihood, citizens could make decision based on the good of the community, not on who they needed to gain favor with or owed a debt. Things did not turn out exactly like Jefferson envisioned. During Jefferson’s time the majority of Americans were farmers. Today North Carolina has the dubious distinction of leading the nation in the loss of farmers.

What we have evolved into is a country of consumers. But we don’t have to be powerless consumers! In fact there can be great power in our choosing to vote with our food dollars. And voting with food dollars is a great first step in taking control of where our food comes from, who grows it, and how it is grown. The metaphor of voting with your food dollar can lead to more informed actual voting on policy that affects food and farming.

The organization I have the privilege of working for, the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP), has been working to increase the availability of locally-grown food and to let people know where to find the food. We are fortunate here to still have so many farms and have so many people who want to eat good food, preserve a scenic landscape, and support family farms. Over the next year I will write about the many opportunities to buy local food, the issues facing farmers, and local and national policy.