Big MACC Attack

Free Range Trickiness

A friend sent me a link to an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times today that questions what the author considers the assumption that free range animal agriculture is inherently superior to CAFO meat manufacturing operations. Free Range Trichinosis is the clever title, and it was penned by a history professor at Texas State - San Marcos who conveniently has a book coming out about "how locavores are endangering the future of food."

The gentleman does know how to turn a phrase, and I am sure that the loyal employees of the industrial food companies will buy enough copies (with company money?) to keep it up in the Bestseller Beauty Shows and Amazon Rankings for a goodly while. But the piece in the paper is riddled with logical fallacies, non-sequitors and dirty rhetoric. If I get the time, I'd like to do a little background research that it seems The Times did not (at least not before the piece ran -- there is an addendum on the web now, pointing out that the research which forms the heart of his critique was funded by the National Pork Board). I'm not sure they could have, given the way things are written, and of course Op-Eds are held to a different standard than news, and unless the book is self-published, simply enticing a publisher with a juicy, topical title makes the writer a hot property -- and, in the case of The Times, a small proof of "balance," sort of like the Washington Post printing the vacuous stupidity of Charles Krauthammer.

There is the core conflation of "locavore" and "free range," and later, "slow food." These are hot terms of the moment that are bound to sell books, but while often used near each other in the Googlish sense, the terms are not inherently connected in the real world of food production -- I doubt that "local" veal or fois gras is free range, and so these words are mere straw men the author has set up to bat down.

One example: right in the first paragraph there is a quote from a "purveyor" as to how the benefits of free range are indisputable and then immediately the author notes that this is "another reminder that culinary wisdom is never conventional." Now apparently the professor has been outside the city limits of San Marcos, because he correctly understands that chefs (I assume this is what he means by culinary) haven't always had the best grasp of how food is actually produced.

Twenty five years ago I hosted a vegetable tasting at a prestigious local resort (this was in Vermont, where such things were just getting going...California was years ahead of us) and the executive chef was astounded that we had twelve kinds of carrots to taste.

"When I was in culinary school, there were only three kinds of carrots," he told me.

Intrigued, and having some experience of fifty or so different varieties, I asked him, "Which three?"

"Five pound bags, ten pound bags and twenty five pound bags." We became instant friends and he has gone on to become a staunch advocate of local food.

But our author slyly conflates "purveyor" and "culinary" in this case. Quotations are usually from a specific person, who is identified, so we can assess the credibility of that person (disclosure: my quotation in the first paragraph above is part of the overly long title of the forthcoming book). Some "purveyors" I have know over my thirty years on the production side of the food business buy and sell damaged crates of iceberg from the trunk of a too-old Cadillac, while others not only run top notch operations, but are as familiar with trade press and scientific journals as any professor of history.

Did you notice the subtle diss? I called him a professor of history (which he claims to be) and thus planted the meme that he doesn't necessarily know anything about food -- he might, and I would like to read this "forthcoming" book to see -- and that is another of his unexamined tactics in the piece, which can only help sales of the book: the use of terms for people he purports to disagree with to essentially play off their mind share. A Swift Beef bogosity attack; Colbert X Coulter -- now there is a hybrid (or chimera) that outdoes even Carville X Matalin.

So the second paragraph includes a salting of "data" from the scientific journal; I am definitely going to have to look up the original article, as I used to analyze journal articles for a PhD candidate, and found it is amazingly easy it is to honestly or dishonestly, misunderstand or mis-represent the findings (again, the research was funded by the National Pork Board, which promotes CAFOs).

Next we hear that "just a little time outdoors increases pigs' interaction with rats and other wildlife" (etc., I don't want to violate the Times copyright <G>) but it also involves domesticated cats, and -- OmiGod: moist soil, where he says, "pathogens find an environment conducive to growth." (I find it odd not to mention the 24 / 7 heated barns where animals are jammed cheek to jowl, or the "processing" plants where now-dead meat and parts are held in similarly petri-like conditions. Moist soil...Omigod!) In the next paragraph we learn that this will be especially troubling to "connoisseurs of fine pork...supporters of sustainable meat and slow food advocates" who claim that free range meat tastes better.

The oversights, elisions, conflations and (at the end of the paragraph) mindlesss conclusions of this paragraph are almost too numerous to list...the presentation, is, in the end, flakier than a pie crust. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a good report from last September called "Uncovering CAFOs."

The first of those two paragraphs is about the potential for infection of the animals, not about their taste, but the author seems to think that taste and infection are connected in the same sort of way "tasting" a toke at a rock concert (inevitably, OmiGod!) leads to hepatitis C, or oral herpes. I'm sorry...it was a bad example, but no more far out than the one offered. It just doesn't follow, it is not a valid syllogism, no matter how fancy the verbal footwork; he makes no connection between the infection part of the argument and the taste part, but implies it anyway.

There is a hidden connection behind both paragraphs and does honestly join them that the author does not mention -- and if in the book he even considers this aspect, I think I can safely predict he will have something negative to say about it -- and that is the breed of pig in the study he cites. I should be able to check this when I check the journal article. If it is not identified, the study is flawed, and if it is, I think it is likely to be illustrative.

I am going to speak from my prejudice for a moment (no I have not been doing so up till now!). My kids were raised on a vegetable farm, running wild outside and coming home dirty on a regular basis. They were free range kids. Sure they had the usual ear infections and such, but those were picked up a school, an environment more like a confined animal operation than their home. They are now two healthy, robust adults, and my daughter lives in Africa, but even there, with a little appropriate attention to hygiene, has not gotten seriously ill, though surrounded by pathogens. These days, however, kids -- especially suburban kids -- are raised in a near sterile environment and never have a chance to develop the kinds of antibodies and resistances that our kids did.

With modern domestic animals, the situation is even more extreme, especially with chickens, and with pigs, both of which have been bred for confinement production for generations. And that breeding has occured within sterile environments, with the breeder concentrating -- a breeders must -- on a few traits. I would make a guess (which it will be easy enought to check later, since I know where to look) that weight gain, and litter size are two of those. Disease resistance, foraging ability, taste; those were likely no more important than they were in the case of the cardboard tomato that is harvested green, gassed with ethylene and shipped 2000 miles to sit in a supermarket bin for three weeks before being eaten with a notable lack of relish. Myself, as a vegetable gardener, I confer equal Buddha nature on plants and animals; to see the noble pig -- I raised them, small scale, free range, for local sale, for about ten years -- reduced to a commodity is hurtful.

So there are at least two, maybe three, maybe many more distortions even in this small segment of the article. This post is likely going to be two, three, maybe many time longer than the original article simply because of the layers of ignorance and distortion the article displays. To name a few: the taste the author pooh-pahs is due as much to the breed of pig -- say a Hungarian Mangalitsa -- as it is to the free ranging -- though many of the best tasting pig breeds would not thrive in modern confinement any more than a modern industrial pig would thrive in the "wild" of a pasture; the choice of free range is not only one of taste but of ethics, and of environmental responsibility; I see neither of these mentioned, and so will be interested to read the book and find out about the part of its title refered to by "...and how we can truly eat responsibly." But we'll leave that there, or for our other blog, Hand To Mouth.

That conclusion is foreshadowed at the end of the the piece, and I am losing interest in wasting my time to critique this loosely reasoned and tightly written little screed. One last point that I had highlighted from my first read-through, but will never get to if I am going to have a Friday night; after all I am just a blogger, not a media or dot.org professional. That point is shortly before the conclusion and leads directly to it (at least in the authors twisted universe). "Free range is ultimately an arbitrary point between the wild and the domesticated." Du-uh. All agriculture (and horticulture) is by nature un-natural, as it is a controlled environment (a point he makes while trying to prove the opposite) and it is only a matter of where on the continuum your preferences, premises and practices fall. All points on that sort of space-control continuum are arbitray, as dates and times are arbitrary in the phenological world of seasonal time. And not to seem obscure, a phenological world is what both agriculture and horticulture are all about. Methinks our professor should employ a bit less sophistry, and spend a little more time with the people -- farmers, not factorymen -- he so disdains.

USDA HQ Vegetable Garden Dumped On

Maybe it's just the fact that organic is profitable and growing, or maybe its the fact that the new Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, insisted -- or maybe its just good PR -- but the new vegetable garden at the USDA headquarters is getting dumped on.

With compost that is. Delivering the pile was none other than Jeff Moyer, farm director at the Rodale Institute, and new chair of the National Organic Standards Board. Ready to dig in were staff from the institute as well as the acting director of the National Organic Program, Barbara Robinson and board members of the Organic Trade Association.

"We're happy to donate a truckload of high-quality compost to biologically jump-start this welcome change to the USDA's front lawn," said Moyer, as the load came down.

Reports are there was some resistance from within USDA at the high profile organic plot -- not to mention some pressure from without, but as we found when we did a test of organic turf on the Mall, there is plenty of support within federal agencies for greening up -- it was just waiting for spring to sprout.

It's enough to make me run into DC and hand a resume to those folks!

To read the press release from The Rodale Institute, click here.

For more photos of the big dump, visit the photo page.

Money For Quantifying Eco Services of Agriculture

We've noted elsewhere the essential need for quanitfication of the ecosystem services that could be provided by sustainable ag systems, and it seems that now -- finally -- that the nu-clear winter of the past eight years is past, research money is starting to flow to the areas where we need solid data to make some rational decisions about where our climate change abatement dollars are best spent. A good example is this relatively small grant program involving both USDA and EPA (two natural partners in my experience).

This Request For Applications (RFA) "will support research on the ecosystem services in agricultural settings, including both agroecosystems and ecosystems that are impacted by agriculture, with the goal of quantifying these services, identifying risks due to different stressors, and developing strategies to reduce negative environmental impacts while enhancing ecosystem services provided by working lands."

This is not the only RFA out there (we will try to publicize them whenever possible) and I think we can expect a broader range to emerge as both the stimulus bills and the broad environmental outlines of the current administration are unrolled (Hurrah!). I'll do my best to keep you aware of opportunities to use your talents to benefit the world the way I sense you want to (or why would you be reading this blog in the first place?).

Spying On Residue

The USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is working with NASA to help develop a system of estimating crop residue from satellite imagery. The current boots on the ground system is very labor intensive (details in the article) and so a satellite based system would be great time and cost saver. Every since the launch failure of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, I have been following remote sensing schemes a little more closely, because we need data to make good decisions, whether about cropping schemes, or carbon valuation, or even as in the case of another NASA project, the amount of turf in the USA.

Crop residue is important both to the health of the soil, and for the function is plays in carbon sequestration, which is one of the primarly ways in which agriculture can help arrest climate change...sustainable agriculture, that is, which is results in net carbon capture (via the buildup of organic matter in the soil) while no-till merely reduces the carbon footprint of conventional ag,

I wish I could say that this study was done to provide the data to quantify these carbon balances and move us toward a carbon credit program to reward farmers (on a cash basis) for conservation tillage, but alas, the reason for the study is to "identify farm fields that can sustain more residue removal for ethanol production."

It used to be that one of the signs of a bad farmer was that he sold off his manure and hay -- which meant his land was exporting fertility and would deteriorate over time. Nowadays, with synthetic fertilizers and CAFOs, that whole system is a thing of the past...or at least for a while longer until we are forced back to some sort of rudimentary husbandry at least, but the rising cost of energy. There was a time when we grew our energy, and that time will return.

It's Official! Merrigan Confirmed

Late last week before recessing for a two week break, the Senate Agriculture Committee cofirmed Kathleen Merrigan as the new Deputy Secretary of Agriculture. A member of the sustainable ag "dream team," she brings decades of Beltway experience to the job, having spent six years for the committee itself, and from 1999 to 2001 was Administrator of the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) of which the National Organic Program is a part.

Her most recent position was as an Assistant Professor and Director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment Program at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.  at It is hard to imagine a more forward-looking,  progressive choice for this position!

The Ongoing Food Safety Drama - Oh, Really?

In another round of the obvious suddenly becoming visible -- no, not the $165 million in AIG bonuses that were public knowledge last fall but nobody wanted to acknowledge until they came due like death or taxes -- hearings in the House have disclosed cozy relationships between Peanut Corporation of America and the third party inspector they hired to certify plant standards for food manufacturers and the government.

Emails released by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations detail the relationship, which was apparently worth little more than $1000 annually to the inspection firm, one of the largest in the industry. American Insitute of Baking International even gave them a Certificate of Achievement...though it is not clear what they achieved except to trigger, like a bogus mortgage lender, a rippling loss of much larger proportions: Kellogg, for example, relied on audits by the firm, and ended up eating a $70 million dollar peanut butter sandwich. Here is a link to the Washington Post coverage from this morning.

This, and the spinach, and the jalapenos -- these are the motivations behind the new food safety bill, H-875, that is raising such a ruckus out on the farm and food cultures of the web. That bill would create a new Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services which would -- sort of like the TSA consolidated a lot of different programs under a single adminstrator -- most prominently taking all food oversight functions away from the FDA. Another approach, to simply expand the power of the FDA is embodied in an earlier bill, HR 759.

Look for more on these two different approaches in the coming months.

What's Wrong With The NAIS

There is an excellent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this morning by small farmer Shannon Hayes of upstate New York which explains precisely how and why the National Animal Idenitifcation System (NAIS) will hurt small farms and benefit industrial agriculture. NAIS, of course was proposed as a way to limit the spread of diseases like Mad Cow, and allow traceability within the global food system.

I'll let you read the original to get the details, but the arugment revolves around two key points.

First is the classic "cost of entry" argument: industrialized farming is already high tech and standardized, and animals are handled en masse, so the addition of a little record keeping is a minimal intrusion. But for small diversified producers it can cost an added 10% or more of sales, and take 10% of the farmer's time. That's just not supportable.

Second is that, as Shannon points out, these controls are unnecessary -- the same way that organic certification is unnecessary -- when food is produced and sold locally. Neighbors can see the farm, and know how the products were raised; if there is a problem it fairly quick and easy to solve. To include these kinds of local, quick feedback systems in a system designed for global production is a classic kind of "category error" and drives the market, and the food system inevitably toward more centralization -- just as we are discovering the weaknesses of that system.

We may need large, nationally distributed food production to feed the cities, but we shouldn't herd  community-based farmers and farming into the slaughter shute in the process. A system like NAIS makes sense for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and for exporters but not for small farmers. The hearings before the Livestock, Dairy and Poultry Subcommitee of the Agriculture Committee in the House today (10:00 AM Longworth 1300) need to find a way to balance those two realities.

Shannon Hayes is also author of the Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook.

Big Numbers Add Up Both Ways

The inescapable connection between scale and technology, between industrial methods and commodification of food pops up frequently. One example contained in the February 2009 USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) report released this morning shows it in high relief.

The newly formed Egg Safety and Quality Research Unit and Quality and Safety Assessment Research Unit (ESQRU and QSARU -- gotta love those acronyms!) has developed a prototype pressure chamber and camera system that is more accurate than human egg graders (99.4% vs 85.8%). That's all to the good, and helps speed up the egg processing plants, some of which are capable of handling 180,000 eggs an hour.

If that seems astounding to you -- it does to me -- keep in mind that in 2007, more than 90 billion eggs -- that's billion -- were produced in the United States, according to the most recent USDA Census of Agriculture.

I did not call and ask the researchers what this machine is going to cost, but a quick glance at it shows it is not going to be cheap, and so only the largest producers will be able to put it to work. Again, we do need this kind of thing if we are going to keep New York City in eggs (15 million people times 250 eggs, and no close-in farms...you do the math) but we also need research on small scale, local and regional production issues -- including organic and pasture based production -- and that has long been lacking in the USDA research program.

After all, that 250 eggs per year is only slightly better than what a single chicken can do under ideal conditions, with what we already know (egg laying ducks do even better, laying larger eggs, with less cholesterol, but need access to water to thrive, holding down industrial production of duck eggs...) and with some dedicated research we might be able to vastly improve small scale egg production.

Why do this? Well for one thing, it's public money. And yes, the public benefits if there are fewer problems with the industrial food supply: less pathogens, less waste, lower prices...but the economic benefits are going to a relatively small number of large producers and processors who might well be able to fund their own research. And while the specific benefits to tens or hundreds of thousands of small producers might not be as easy to quanitfy it is nonetheless real. Just as 250 eggs per person adds up pretty quickly when you have a lot of people, so does a couple of hundred dollars a year, or an increase of 15 eggs a year per chicken when multiplied time thousands and thousands of small producers.

Unfortunately agricultural research over the years has tended to concentrate on engineering solutions to problems at the expense of cultural problems (on a cash weighted basis) and this has skewed the system toward large (and increasing) scale enterprises, with higher capital needs, and that has affected both the farm population and the communities in which those farms are located.

I certainly doubt we will ever go back to a widely decentralized agriculture (especially in commodity grains) but if we are going to have a two tier system -- large production units to mass produce food for urban areas, and a smaller, more regional agriculture to produce fresh and artisan crops -- then we need to fund both of those. Otherwise the only farms left soon will be the factory farms, and farmers will end up wearing lab coats and just operating computers instead of actually growing food.

Here is a link to the full online magazine article on the USDA-ARS website.

2007 Ag Census Out - Trends Continue

The 2007 USDA Census of Agriculture was issued last week, and the take home story is that the trends that were apparent in the 2002 Census are continuing. The New York Times business section ran a solid half page piece by Andrew Martin on Sunday that noted the trends, and you can expect more coverage here as we have a chance to slice and dice the numbers.

For now, in brief, here are some of the continuing trends:

• the number of farms overall is increasing, but

• the size of the average farm is shrinking, while

• a larger percentage of total production is coming from a smaller number of larger farms, because

• capital and government payment flow primarily to the largest producers, and so

• the percentage of farmers with off-farm income increased again, and while

• the average farmer is a 57 year old white male,

• the number of female farmers grew another 30% and

• the number of organic farmers grew again, this time by more than 50%

Looking at the image of the change in farm numbers supplied by USDA I am especially struck by the decrease in farm numbers in New York and Oregon (especially around Portland), and in Tennessee, as I drove through eastern Tennessee just this past weekend, and it looked to have a more vibrant farm economy than here at the head of the Shenandoah Valley (in WV) which is showing a lot of blue. I am also surprised at the amount of blue in NE Arizona (which I would assume has to do with the much described lifestyle farmer / rancher, who produces just enough to get a property tax break). I also note heavy blue in areas with strong organic farmers associations, such as Northeast, Pennsylvania, Texas and the upper Midwest.

Look for more coverage also on our new blog Hand to Mouth, which focuses on the new farm and food economy, and Sinks or Swim, which covers plant based carbon sequestration -- which was mentioned by new USDA chief and former Iowa Governor, Tom Vilsack, as a potential new source of income for farmers. Hear, hear!

If you'd like to look at the actual report, here is a link to the online version of the 2007 Census.

MSM and Second Hand Information

A couple of montha ago, I clipped a small article from the NY Times Science section (thus it must have been a Tuesday, though I don't seem to have noted the date) about crop irrigation in the western US. "Drip Irrigation May Not Be Efficient, Analysis Finds," by the appropriately named Henry Fountain. I came across it again today, and it re-caught my attention because that finding goes against common, and my general, knowledge.

Mr. Fountain apparently called or emailed Dr. Ward, whom he quotes as saying, among other things, "The take home message is that you'd better take a pretty careful look at drip irrigation before you spend a bunch of money on subsidizing it." The buttressing logic as laid out in the article is this:

1. Excess water from furrow irrigation seeps back into the aquifer, recharging it and providing more water for other uses

2. Drip irrigation systems deliver water directly to plant root zones with no waste (that's not efficient? [ed.])

3. Plants on drip irrigation grow better and yield higher, so farmers expand acreage

4. Therefore, aquifers are depleted more with drip irrigation, which decreases water available for other uses

So I pulled up the original paper: "Water conservation in irrigation can increase water use." [sic] to see what it said, and to what degree Mr. Fountain had "correctly" portayed its findings.

[Disclaimer: my work study job while studying Environmental Journalism at UMass / Amherst was analyzing journal articles for a PhD candidate -- there was no Google in those days, just reams of Greenbar citations -- and writing him synopses of those I deemed relevant to his research.]

After reading the title of the paper I can see why Fountain went with the lead he did, because it jibes fairly well with the PNAS headline. But upon reading the full paper (linked above for the hardy) there are, as one often finds when looking at technical ag reports that seem to violate common sense, some classic problems with methodology -- and gaps in reporting -- that change the picture considerably.

So let me take the points of the (incompletely reported) syllogism above one by one:

One:  While the paper does discuss what it calls "mass water balance" (Pg 18216) and while there is a very helpful schematic of the Rio Grande river and reservoir system, evaporative losses are only offered for the reservoirs, not the field streams, or furrows, which is actually the only point of difference in non-plant evaporative processes between the two systems -- nor is there any estimate of the surface area of these furrows, either on a per acre basis, or across the study area from which to derive those losses tha I could see. Later, though, in the section Solving the Model, they state that their model accounts for "losses (field, conveyance, and reservoir evaporation)." One is left (forced) to assume that the "conveyance" losses include furrow evaporation...but again I don't see that number.

Two:  It turns out to be economic efficiency, not agricultural efficiency they are talking about in terms of the drip irrigation, which is not what the article and accompanying picture imply. In fact, and this is in both the article and the paper, it is precisely the agricultural efficiency of drip irrigation that  is the trigger for the problem under discussion, which is actually the functioning of markets.
The NYT article compounds this conflation with a bit of journalistic flair: "Drip systems are costly, but they save much water. [sic] Or do they?" So much better than those amateur bloggers, eh? <G>
A close reading of the paper evaporates (if you will) any question about whether drip systems save water; they do, on a production and income per acre basis. The question is how they affect the allocation of water between agriculture and other uses. As the authors say, "Our findings also suggest that where return flows [i.e. seepage from furrows back to aquifers, ed.] are an important source of downstream water supply, reduced deliveries from the adoption of more efficienct irrigation measures will redistribute the basin's water supply, which could impair existing water rights holder..."

Third: The efficiency of drip systems increases yields per acre and per acre-foot of water, thereby increasing farm incomes. The degree of increase is (obviously) affected by how much of the cost of installing the system is paid for by taxpayers -- the "green tech" subsidies that are the actual subject of the paper -- and that affects the profits available to invest in further production efficiency, in this case in the form of drip irrigation. In the early part of the paper one feels that the authors have an unexamined assumption that  farmers will inevitably expand with profits. This is an assumption behind most of our food system, and it is mostly unexamined because it is at the core of the system, which is driven by capital investment and intensivity, which drive scale increases (seemingly) inexorably.
However, there is a telling sentence in the authors' page 18218 discussion of Table 3: "In fact, water depletions, yields, and acreage are all predicted to increase if total water use is not constrained to base levels by the various water authorities. If total irrigated acreage is also allowed to increase, the potential increase in water depletions is even higher."

Let me offer an example from another field. It won't do any good to raise the efficiency of motor vehicles by 20% if we add 30% more vehicles to the roadways. It may be better than adding that 30% without the increased efficiency, but without know the carrying capacity of the system (in that case the atmosphere, and in this case the aquifer / river system) and limiting the load (the burden of our activities) to a figure below that amount, the system will degrade over time. Very Simple. (We discuss this kind of question more fully in our blog Sinks or Swim).

There-Fourth: the real story here is not that implied by the headlines, but this, in the words of the authors:

1. large scale "adjustments in the water cycle to climate, weather, and land-use change will have large and complex effects on economic and ecological systems,'
   and the pre-drip ag methodology was balanced, negotiated, adjudicated [whatever] based on the inefficiency of water uptake in the furrow system.

2. "Water rights, water markets, water transfers, and water accounting need to be defined in terms of water depleted, not just water applied. Without defining water use in terms of depletions, individual farmers who invest in more efficient irrigation systems recognize that they use less water per acre."
   So these farmers, with their increased incomes (or subsidies) expand acreage, up to their current usage "rights," which because of the greater agricultural efficiency of the drip technology, leads to the problem of greater depletion of the aquifer. A classic tragedy of the commons.

The "take home mesage" here actually is that every technological change requires a socio-political change to keep the system in balance. Absent that, technology just speeds up the degradation of the culture and the environment (IMHO). And the reporter, trained that a good quote is always better than close analysis of the original work, confuses economic and agricultural efficiency and free markets with "the commons," and in so doing intentionally or not does a hatchet job on a necessary technology.