Big MACC Attack

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.

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!

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.

A Fifty Year Farm Plan

Yesterday's New York Times carried an Op-Ed piece jointly written by Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, two of our better long term thinkers on how to create (or re-create) a sustainable food system, triggered by concerns about the new Farm Bill.

Wes Jackson, of course, has spent decades at The Land Institute in Kansas working to develop perennial grain crops with high enough yields to replace annuals -- all for the purpose of reining in the disastrous rate of soil erosion in the midwestern USA.

Wendell Berry, the author of The Unsettling of America and many other books of essays on farming and culture, could well be the patron saint of this site, as that book was my first guide to what I was really doing when I became a vegetable farmer in the early 1980's.

The piece hits the four big points that every one talks about but that never seem to make it onto the table when policy is actually set:

• soil loss and degradation

• toxic pollution

• petroleum dependency, and

• the destruction of rural communties.

And yes, they do mention the positive impact of good soil management: increased carbon sequestration, which fights global warming. They also note the long held intellectual fallacy that all inputs are substitutable and that the fungibility of money will somehow feed the planet (an idea even more ludicrous than its proponents' claim that organic agriculture could never feed the world, I might add). Berry created the concept of "The Great Economy" and knows what he is talking about here.

For anyone who wants a quick primer on the interconnectedness of these issues and how any plan to address any of them will have to address all of them -- in a sustained fashion -- this short piece is a must-read.

Speaking Truth To Power, NOT

A Chinese blogger's entry on her country's melamine tainted baby milk powder scandal was reprinted in the Washington Post this morning, and should be read by everyone with a stake in reforming the industrial food system.

It is a soul searching piece that reaches behind the immediate, shocking reality of how industrialization and globalization of the food supply can lead to huge, widespread problems that the older, more regionalized system contained inherently -- due to scale, rather than any basic superiority or goodness.

Think back a year or so. Then it was American pet deaths ...now it is Chinese infants. What to do?

What Cui recounts is an anecdote, related by a country cousin, about a deeper corruption, what she sees as a moral failing of her countrymen that is a sort of perverse playout of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) principle -- though NIMBY is by its nature, rather, a hypocritical anti-principle.

It involved tainted rice (I'll let you read the post yourself, here) which farmers in the cousin's region knew was poisoned, but sent off to market anyway, knowing it would end up far away and untraceable. This ability, this "freedom" to dump waste at a distance (NIMBY) is something that is only possible when the scale of production (of anything, but here, in this case, and especially, food) puts the scope of the production process "over the horizon," out of sight, out of mind in the same way that toxic trash from the American lifestyle is "exported" to the developing world.

Organic and Fair Trade certification systems (as well as previous government standards) were developed in response to this problem; the question of whether or not they are up to the task depends, I guess, on your assessment of essential human nature. No system can cure human moral weakness, and it is on the socialization, the institutionalization of moral weakness that Cui writes so movingly.