Extreme Tree Planting – Trees for Earth from Peter Hill on Vimeo.

Allan Savory – EXTRACTS – Keeping Cattle: cause or cure for climate crisis? from Feasta on Vimeo.

Some thoughts and observations on it….

Improving our pastures could be a very fast, energy intensive, and expensive proposition, or we could take the gradual, improvement of management approach. Being fundamentally frugal when having to deal with a decent-sized acreage, we’ve gone the gradual approach. In our tenure here, we’ve seen a large increase in the presence of “good” forage grasses, along with vetch and subclover (soil building legumes), with a decline in the weedy annuals that dominated the pastures when we got here.

Marks & Spencer (a high-end UK retailer) spent £200million to take 100,000 cars off the road…in order to reach that level of effect, a 12acre grass fire burning for 15mins will offset all of those cars and money (1.5 acre fire puts out more pollutants than 4000 cars per second). Our seasonally dry climate evolved to burn every few years, and I’d like to include fire in our management at some point, but notwithstanding the conflagration danger, the pollution that it will spew, along with the volatilization of so much of our soil nutrients, makes me think that it’ll be something that we’ll have to pass on.

For the folks who really want to geek out on Holistic Management from the mouth of the prophet, click here for the hour long lecture. It’s a bit dry at the start, but totally worth the time.

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The effect of livestock on greenhouse gas emissions are often overrated, if not entirely exaggerated

Pasture is part of the solution to the carbon issue

Some farms are doing it right

And the systems exist to fix the problem

OK, seriously, I need to post more often.

They talk about land, farm cooperation, and meat processing, as well as our favorite advice to meat buyers – meet the meat…Check it out.

Fortunately, Time magazine comes through with something, so we don’t have to. Their new issue has an article on buying beef by the quarter, conveniently, the same way we sell it. A surprisingly well done piece.

This is just a quick Chelsea Green clip of him speaking recently

I’m a little skeptical of Joel’s energy analysis…tripling of energy prices would have rippling effects on Polyface farm, from the tons of conventional corn that they import for their chickens to the impact the resulting economic downturn would have on their paying customers.

Further, I prefer the word resilient to forgiving, but that’s semantics, and my own ecological terminology bias. All that said, Joel is always an entertaining speaker, and worth a watch.

They chose 10 different products, including eggs, bottled water, manufactured ice, fruit juice, oatmeal, yogurt, flour, milk, freshcut greens and tomatoes. For each product, they tried to trace 4 different samples (for example, 4 cartons of eggs, 4 containers of yogurt, etc.) So their sample size was 40 products (10 types x 4 units each) Out of the 40 products, only 5 were fully traceable – 3 cartons of eggs, 1 container of yogurt, and 1 bottle of water.

According to the study, the eggs had the shortest supply chain – from farm to retailer. I think that says a lot about the major problem relating to food safety in our country… there are so many links in the chain that our ability to trace our food is greatly diminished, especially if record-keeping is poorly done.

As a food consumer (and preparer for my toddler son), if food items — even simple whole foods such as tomatoes or milk — are not easily traceable to their source, why should I be expected to buy those products with confidence? And the study didn’t even look at something like ground beef, or prepackaged and prepared foods (such as crackers made with peanut butter), both of which I’ll bet are probably even more difficult to trace than the items in the study.

And furthermore, why should I spend my food dollars in a system that can’t guarantee quality or traceability? To my mind, those two things are linked. If it can take weeks to identify all the possibly food products where tainted peanut may have ended up, how is it possible to buy items with confidence?

And where exactly are my food dollars are going, and how are those dollars are related to the quality of a product? The more hands that products go through before reaching mine, the less money there is to go back to the original producer. If the producer is hardly making any money per item, that means that they probably are extremely large, because the only way they’d be making a profit and staying in business is through the economy of scale. If they are extremely large, that means that there probably aren’t hands-on owners taking responsibility for their products… most likely there are share-holders. The bottom line for share-holders is making a profit.

Profit might be motivation for a share-holder driven business (AKA corporation) to encourage food safety, as the economic loss due to a food recall is huge, but should that be the primary motivation for producing and distributing safe, high quality food? Food is a basic need, something which we consume several times a day to nourish our bodies. Do we really want to rely on a system where corporations may or may not be producing safe food, based on concerns about their bottom line?

And what about other “quality”-related issues like humane treatment of animals, fair wages and good conditions for workers, sustaining farmland ecologically, socially, and politically? If we use our food dollars within the current system of food production and distribution, aren’t we sending the message that we don’t care about those things? Since we don’t really know where our food is coming from, how do we really know that producers’ values are aligned with ours?

Going back to my question above, if a government study can’t easily trace milk, greens, or tomatoes, can we really have confidence in our current food system? And furthermore, why do we want to support this system? I think the greater good would be local-based food systems, with supply chains that are short and traceable, and not dependent on an out-dated, fossil fuel-intense system of distribution.

I vote for a local food system with my food dollars as much as possible. I buy produce at the farmers’ market. I buy my eggs from friends. I shop at a locally-owned market chain, and buy local products from them as much as possible. I don’t value cheap food – I value quality food. And I probably pay more for our groceries than I have to, but I feel better knowing that most of my food dollars stay right in in Oregon. And that very little of it goes to middle men. And that I can trace most of the food my family eats right back to the farm it came from. That, for me, is food safety.

The critical shortage that I see in a western OR-produced chicken feed is the availability of a few critical proteins that our climate doesn’t produce very well, at least vegetatively. Rebecca goes into this in good detail.

There’s a pretty big movement to get people and their animals off of soy products for both health and environmental reasons. Not to mention the Soylandia effect with it’s habitat, energy, and national security implications. Soy is quite a crutch, and a hard habit to break, since it’s a very nutrient-dense food that fills a lot of nutritional holes with it’s near complete protein complement. The downside for us is that feed-grade soy doesn’t do very well in our cooler summer climate. Assuming that animal products aren’t going to be used to fill out the ration, I’ll be interested to see what folks come up with.

This article talks about Vilsack’s newfound progressive take on the future of agriculture, acknowledging the importance of food to all Americans.  Not so different than Nicolas Kristof’s call for a Department of Food, and a welcome change from his history of support for GMO crops.

And a side note, Kathleen Merrigan was selected as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture…check the link for all-around good news.

An interesting aside, Vilsack was also interviewed on OPB’s morning program Think Out Loud a few weeks back.  You can listen / pod it here.  I heard a couple of weeks ago when it was going to happen, but finally got around to listening to it today.