Monday, May 11, 2009

From Carolyn Walsh following our Fete



Stewardship is personal responsibility for taking care
of another person's property or financial
 affairs or in religious orders taking care of finances. Historically, stewardship was the responsibility given to household servants to bring food and drinks to a castle dining hall. The term was then expanded to indicate a household employee's responsibility for managing household or domestic affairs. Stewardship later became the responsibility for taking care of passengers' domestic needs on a ship, train and airplane, or managing the service provided to diners in a restaurant. The term continues to be used in these specific ways, but it is also used in a more general way to refer to a responsibility to take care of something one does not own. "Every person has a responsibility to look after the planet both for themselves and for the future generations. Acting irresponsibly could cause damage such as pollution, the destruction of cultural heritage, etc."




Friday, May 8, 2009

If you grow it, you can come ... Plot luck 2009

This is our next great venture - I am so inspired by what the crew at Sunset Magazine have done with forming their various "teams" to explore local food ventures that we are going to have a series of "Plot lucks" this growing season (thank you Carolyn Walsh for that catchy term)

 Obviously this will be a very exclusive dining group - you must have grown it, or caught it, in order to attend - and you will need to bring it with you to our feast - no cheating!

Short on space?  Lettuce makes beautiful window boxes - mixed textures, colors, add some nasturtiums - Spinach in a container will last longer as you can move it into cooler sites when summer heats up - Kale is a magnificent bold partner in any container, Artichokes do great in a containers - as to Watermelon!

And then there is foraged food.  And things we don't think about like daylilies - key ingredient in many Chinese dishes.

This can give us all a chance to see our progress, mull over failures, learn more from each other about what works and what doesn't work on Nantucket and become even better gardeners, beekeepers, egg gatherers ...

Anyone know how to make sheep cheese?  How about perennial crops? berries? fruit trees?

Stay tuned.  The One Island Diet

Thursday, May 7, 2009

michael pollan - 5/4/09 making farmers cool again

Michael Pollan, “Deep Agriculture”

May 6th, 02009 by Kevin Kelly

Michael PollanMaking farmers cool again

Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle. “American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative, and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to give them a new set of requirements.”

The benefit of a reformed food system, besides better food, better environment and less climate shock, is better health and the savings of trillions of dollars. Four out of five chronic diseases are diet-related. Three quarters of medical spending goes to preventable chronic disease. Pollan says we cannot have a healthy population, without a healthy diet. The news is that we are learning that we cannot have a healthy diet without a healthy agriculture. And right now, farming is sick.

Pollan outlined what this recovery for American farmers and food producers should be. First a post-modern food system should be “resolarized.” Right now it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to manufacture 1 calorie of food on average, and 55 calories to produce 1 calorie of beef. If any industry should be solar-based it should be food, which was the “original solar economy.” Instead, right now “we are eating oil.” Cheap oil and farm policies subsidize the 5 main crops (and only those crops), upon which the rest of our cheap food system is based. These main crops are planted as monocultures, which require cheap pesticides and fertilizers and produce wastes that are all problems in themselves. Pollan’s solution is not to dismantle the food system but to redirect it. Because of the long-term planning and learning that stewarding land requires, he believes subsidies of some type are essential for agriculture. Agriculture, he stated, should not be a freemarket. By picking the proper incentives we can re-localize, re-solarize, and revive the healing power of balanced farms and wholesome gardens.

Governments should reward farmers for diversifying away from monocultures. Pollan gave a few examples of where this has worked at scale. They should be rewarded for growing cover crops with the benefit of reducing erosion. Rewarded for returning animals to the mix. Rewarded for the amount of carbon they sequester in soil. Rewarded for halting urban sprawl by keeping farmland intact. In fact farmland should find a similar status as wetlands; developers and communities get “credit” for retaining farmland. Farmers should be rewarded for localize food provision. If only 2% of government contracts for food (as in school lunch programs, or government-run hospitals) required that the food be produced within 100 miles, it would transform the food system.

How might such change happen? Only if consumers and citizens demand it. One thing that might help is if web cams and images of the actual feed lot, or slaughterhouse, were required to be available for food that flowed through it. Imagine getting a carton of milk that showed not a metaphorical alpine meadow, but the real cages of the real dirty cows that produced that liter of milk. Or put a second calories count on labels, this one showing how many calories of energy it takes to deliver the item to you.

The major problem with his vision? He says there are simply not enough farmers. Only 1 million now feed the US and other people of the world. Many more people, many more college educated people, many more innovators and entrepreneurs, and many more backyard gardeners need to produce this new food system. Start in educational programs, such as one promoted by Alice Waters, where kids learn to grow food, cook, and eat smarter. “Make lunch an academic subject.” Follow the lead of Michelle Obama and make turning lawns into organic gardens fashionable, respectable.

Make farms and farmers cool again

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

New York Times January 5, 2009

oy! my shift key is stuck!

this is one very good reason to join us this saturday may 9 - and please scroll down for tons of information on our Eat your Garden festivities - these 2 men are my greatest living cultural heros - please enrich your lives and read more of their works.  The farm bill is a passion of mine - i believe it is the most important domestic legislation our congress works with - as it determines the future of our food,OUR AGRICULTURAL   practices - a good issue to w eigh in on.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS

A 50-Year Farm Bill




Published: January 4, 2009

THE extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall — by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.

Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.

Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.

Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

This is a political issue, certainly, but it far transcends the farm politics we are used to. It is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs.

Wes Jackson is a plant geneticist and president of The Land Institute in Salina, Kan. Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer in Port Royal, Ky.