Why Did You Write This Book?

A few weeks ago my partner, Elizabeth Wolf of Good Medicine Media, asked me to sit down for an interview about The Call of the Land. She began with the most basic question:

Q: Why did you write the book?

A: I recognize two things: first, the severely depleted condition of our land and our Earth, and second, in conjunction with that, the great number of agrarian initiatives that have independently sprung up in North America, Europe, and elsewhere in the world. The book names endeavor after endeavor, from coast to coast. They take place on the level of individual households as well as neighborhoods, communities, churches, cities, and regions. The book offers up dozens upon dozens of examples of these positive initiatives.

For example, there’s Will Allen with Growing Power in Milwaukee. He has turned vacant city lots into dynamically productive gardens and created meaningful work for inner-city youths. They learn skills and have an opportunity to make an important contribution to the communities they’re a part of. I think of the literally thousands of CSAs that have sprung up in the USA since 1986 when I first began reporting on them and how they involve hundreds of thousands of individuals as shareholders and beneficiaries. In CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture, individuals and families buy a share in a farm and receive a box of fresh produce at regular intervals during the season, weekly for example. The community shares the risks of farming with the farmer, and benefits from the bounty.

Then there’s the Quivira Coalition in New Mexico, which is creating network linkages among ranchers and environmentalists all across the West. Courtney White, the director, points out that these two groups have traditionally been at odds with each other. The Quivira Coalition creates an opportunity for them to recognize their common interests. After all, they both want the same thing: for the land to be healthy and productive.

I felt it was important to acknowledge all these independent initiatives — and there are thousands of them — as constituting a movement forward into the future, a positive, solution-based thrust into the future that was based on an ancient and venerable concept, agrarianism.What we have got now, with all the land and food initiatives individually and networked, together, is the emerging reality of 21st Centry agrariaism. That’s what I wanted to tell about in The Call of the Land.

Almost everything I’ve ever written, over a career of more than 35 years, has to do with the Earth, whether it’s directly addressing the subject of farming or through engagement with Native American spiritual elders who invariably have insights on the Earth. It is my consuming passion: taking care of the Earth which makes our lives possible.

The Call of the Land to be sounded on radio

Tuesday evening November 17, author Steven McFadden will take to the radio airwaves to talk about his new book — The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century. Host Dennis Kornbluh of Star City Blog will guide the discussion on KZUM, 89.3 FM out of Lincoln, Nebraska.

UPDATE:  As of Wednesday, November 18, Star City Blog has posted to the web two MP# audio files with the full one-hour radio interview. To listen or to download, click here.

Arising from Sacred Land, Aiming to the Future

On an August evening about two months ago, Doug George-Kanentiio offered a ten-minute oration while the Sun was setting. Choosing good words, he spoke about the power of great art, about our prophetic era, and about our relations with the land and each other. At the end, he gave voice to the emerging vision of establishing an Indigenous University in America.

Sacred Rain Arrow by Allan Houser

The microphone Kanentiio stood at that evening was set on land about twenty-five paces from “Sacred Rain Arrow,” one of the sculptural masterpieces created by the late Allan Houser. Kanentiio’s talk was part of a benefit event for Go Native Arts, hosted in the garden of the Houser Estate about 20 miles south of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

An hour after Kanentiio’s oration, his wife Joanne Shenandoah stood before the same microphone. By this time the stars had emerged, and Jupiter was strong in the sky to the East. Joanne faced south, centered herself, and gave voice to the enthralling Prophecy Song from her Orenda CD. She was supported with harmonies arising from daughter, Leah, and flanked in the West by the beseeching bronze presence of Sacred Rain Arrow.

We are now reminded
to be aware of our place upon this earth.
and to fulfill our obligations to ourselves,
our families, our nations,
the natural world, the Creator.

The words sing, we are to awaken.
Stand up,  Be counted,
for you are being recognized in the Spirit world.

- Joanne Shenandoah – Copyright

Several days after the benefit event, I met Kanentiio again amid a crush of people by the Plaza bandstand at the annual Santa Fe Indian Market. We found a quiet place to sit and talk.

To answer my questions about the land, Kanentiio began telling of where he was born and raised, Akwesasne Mohawk Territory on the shores of Kaniatarowanenneh (St. Lawrence River) at the New York-Ontario frontier. The Mohawks are part of the Iroquois Confederacy, and the Keepers of the Eastern Door. Their confederacy is the oldest, active participatory democracy on Earth. With its Great Law of Peace, the Confederacy was a direct example and inspiration for the U.S. Constitution.

A former editor of Akwesasne Notes, Kanentiio is also a founder of the Native American Journalists Association, and the author of several books, including Iroquois on Fire: A Voice from the Mohawk Nation. In collaboration with his wife, Joanne, he is co-author of Skywoman: Tales of the Iroquois.

For many years Kanentiio served on the board of directors for the National Museum of the American Indian, and he is currently serving on the board for the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the largest interfaith gathering on Earth. Steadily growing in scope and influence, the Parliament will reconvene this December in Melbourne, Australia.

As we talked in Santa Fe, Kanentiio reminded me that Mohawk Territory straddles the border between the USA and Canada. It’s territory that’s in both nations, and it’s in neither. “Akwesasne is a nexus,” he said. “It’s situated at a juncture of land and water that is of considerable strategic importance. We straddle the St. Lawrence River at what were once known as the 25-mile rapids.” These rapids serve as a key natural valve of flow in relationship between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean.

“Historically at Akwesasne the lives of the people were interwoven with the land and the water. People were called there because the place had all the resources necessary for life, and those resources gave stability to the people and to the community. That provided the Mohawk people with a high degree of cultural continuity, and it gave us a certain power and purpose. We always had that.

“Then in April of 1959 there came a break with this pattern. The St. Lawrence Seaway came into being, and our whole way of life changed. The natural, free flow of the living waters at 25-mile rapids was choked with locks. That energetic change fractured our community. It messed up the fishing grounds, and it separated the people from the water and from the land. We began to metamorphose from a vigorous people to a sedentary people. We became wage earners for the first time, dependent on money, and we began to lose our language. That brought about a huge change in values, and a whole generation of our children began to change from that point onward.

“When traditional indigenous peoples are separated from the land, then there is a break in trust in relation to the land – a break that goes both ways. We don’t trust the land, and the land doesn’t trust us. But you must have that trust. When we don’t communicate with each other, and when we don’t communicate with the land, the relationships become abrasive.”

In this context, Kanentiio mentioned Handsome Lake (Ganyahdiyok), the legendary figure who brought Gaiwiio (Good Words) to the people over 200 years ago. Among his life experiences, Handsome Lake was given a vision of the future. He foresaw environmental disasters including air and water pollution, and he offered prophetic cautions.

“Handsome Lake and others warned us that the final assault on the Iroquois – the greatest danger – would come from within. That’s what’s happening now,” Kanentiio said. “In terms of ideals, the Iroquois Confederacy represents something very good. But things change. Metamorphosis has continued and is continuing today, but at a faster pace. In our tradition we have in our creation story an important part about the twins, one twin of the good mind and one twin of the bad mind. That’s something to remember. These twins are always present.”

“Smuggling of tobacco and narcotics, and gambling — whatever commands a profit — has created a narco-culture at Akwesasne,” he said. “Our good, traditional Iroquois values of humility, compassion, simplicity, generosity and communal service have been replaced by greed, intimidation, violence, and death.”

After hearing this, I told Kanentiio of a meeting that happened about 17 years ago in Montreal. I found myself sitting beside the widely known and respected Hopi messenger Thomas Banyacya in a hotel lobby after he had given a talk. As we conversed, Grandfather Banyacya told me that long ago, when the Earth had gone through another epic metamorphosis, gambling had been the precipitating factor. “That was the last straw,” Banyacya told me. “When the gambling and all its related problems built up to a certain level, that triggered the great flood that cleansed the land.”

After listening to my story, Kanentiio responded. “We Indian people are supposed to be the custodians of the land, but what we are doing now is running casinos. We are sidetracked. We have lost sight of what we are supposed to do. The bright, shiny thing along the path has enticed many of the people to become lost, to lose track. Handsome Lake warned of that a long time ago, and now it’s everywhere.

“The Earth is beginning to stir,” he said. “She’s beginning to express the dreams and visions of long ago. The Earth is showing us that she’s increasingly upset with us. The Earth is beginning to arouse. There will be huge changes in this time of reckoning, of healing, until the balance is restored. We are very close now. It won’t be subtle. Big winds will come. The Earth will shrug its shoulders.

“We are not able to change this movement toward purification,” Kanentiio said, “but we know some things will survive. The Confederacy will endure in spite of itself. That is a shared understanding among traditionals, that despite all the odds the Confederacy will survive and go on, as the larger world will also go on in a new way.

“People feel the urgency of the changes now, and many are motivated to do things. That’s good. Preserve what you can. You have to leave something good and tangible behind.

A particular thing that Kanentiio would like to help leave behind is an Indigenous University for North America.

“A few years ago, Vine Deloria, Jr. thought maybe we could take the system of formal education, which had been used to undermine traditional native societies, and reverse it’s impact by creating our own institution based on the university system,” Kanentiio said. “We would create a formal, accredited university where native knowledge keepers would have a place to teach.

“We have native colleges, but an Indigenous University could in time meet and exceed universal standards for learning, and provide formal instruction in all native arts and sciences, of which there are many.  It would have a high emphasis on online study. That’s a dream of ours.”

The Indigenous University would be open to everybody on the planet, no restrictions of race or religion. ”That is typical Iroquois,” Kanentiio explained. “Our way is to make it possible that people come to a meeting of the good mind. To get there, you need to sit in respect with one another. You have to invite people from all walks of life and viewpoints to share information, and you have to listen to one another.

“We have the ideas to create an Indigenous University,” he said. “What we need now are the physical and financial means to bring it about.”

Joanne Shenandoah and Doug George-Kanentiio

In a related effort to weave indigenous viewpoints into the world’s larger framework, Kanentiio and Joanne — as well as other native peoples from North America and around the world — have become involved with the Parliament of World Religions. “We have in part managed to get the Parliament to adopt a native perspective on the Earth: to regard the Earth not as a commodity, but as a being.”

Kanentiio serves on the board of directors for the Parliament. He noted that the theme of their December, meeting will be ‘Reconciling with Mother Earth.’  “My hope for this Parliament,” he said, “is that teachers from world’s various disciplines, Jews, Evangelical Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Roman Catholics, and many more — can get together again in Melbourne and finally acknowledge that Earth is a living planet and should have standing. If spiritual leaders accept that, and take these spiritual understandings to their nations and congregations to make it a guiding principle, then that’s a good thing.

“We feel the real revolution in human society will come about through these spiritual changes,” Kanentiio said. “It has to happen there first, on the spiritual level. Once we change the spiritual, then the politics will follow.

“For me,” he said, “the roots of this understanding go back to our Iroquois value that all human beings have equal worth, if not necessarily equal abilities. Everyone’s life has meaning. Some are singers and healers, and some are cooks or builders, but each one of us has the blessings of existence. To cultivate this, to acknowledge, to have gratitude for being alive. You can always do that. Our lives are not casual, not by chance. We have been directed here to this time and place, and we are meant to take all of our life experiences with us, all the joys, suffering, and pain, and to take it with us with good mind when we return to the place of living light. That makes the light stronger for the generations to come.”

Author’s Note: Many of the themes articulated in this story are also explored in my epic, nonfiction saga of a North American journey through our era of transition, Odyssey of the 8th Fire. – S. McFadden

Our Survival Imperative: Cultivating Diversity

Dr. Vandana Shiva

“I don’t call it ‘climate change’ any more,” Vandana Shiva said last night in Santa Fe. “That term sounds too benign to some, as if climate change could be portrayed as a beneficial thing with Eskimos able to sunbathe and so forth. But that’s not what’s really happening, so to make the true point I call it ‘climate kills.’ That’s what’s really happening. And industrial agriculture is playing a large part in creating climate kills.”

Dr. Shiva is in New Mexico this week to participate in the first international conference sponsored by IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements). A powerhouse at the podium, she is a scientist, philosopher, environmental activist, and author of over 300 scientific papers. Her influential books include Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, and Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

Last night – as she has consistently and eloquently over her career – she warned about the increasing dangers of industrial agriculture, genetically modified crops and seeds, and the burgeoning monopoly of the world’s food system by transnational corporations. “The monopolies are killing diversity, and killing farmers,” she said. “Food is not a commodity for speculation and profit. It is our essential source of nutrition that life may continue.”

Navdanya logo

Dr. Shiva said we must move from ‘suicide economies’ to ‘living economies’  She told of how in India some villages have established themselves as safe zones – free of agricultural chemicals and genetically modified seeds and food. “If governments won’t ban this stuff and protect the people,” she said, “then the people and the villages themselves will do it…No law is high enough to override the ethical duty we have to the Earth and to future generations. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is our survival imperative.”

In 1987 Dr. Shiva founded Navdanya, an organizational pioneer in the movement of sustainable, organic agriculture, and seed saving in response to the crisis of agricultural biodiversity.  Over the last two decades, among other things, Navdanya has established more than 54 community seed banks in India. She encouraged others actively to consider establishing community seed banks, where neighbors, towns, and urban blocks grow and store  natural open-pollinated varieties of seeds.

In her keynote remarks last night, Dr. Shiva said “We can now move forward only by picking up the proven, healthy threads from the past, and extending them into the future.”

Pollinator Perplex: Update on the Honeybees

Birds, bees, and bats continue to perish in great numbers around the world. These massive die offs affect not only their specific communities of life, but also our natural world and our food supply.

Our winged relatives weave essential threads through the whole of life as they carry pollen from plant to plant and cause the land to bloom. Their loss to earth is inestimable. The ongoing decline of pollinators is one form of global change that will alter the shape and structure of the land and our capacity to live upon it.

This recent report on the evolving status of the bees comes from writer Jodi Peterson at High Country News:

“It’s been more than two years since High Country News reported on the West’s  disappearing honeybees. Since then, parasitic  mites and a mysterious syndrome called colony collapse disorder have  killed off thousands more hives.

“Honeybees pollinate 80 percent of the  fruits and vegetables we eat, and many wild species essential to  ecosystems. In China, hive collapse has forced farmers to start  pollinating fruit trees by hand with brushes.

“Now, researchers at  Washington State University think they’ve figured out the major causes of  colony collapse disorder…”

Millennial Agrarians Rise to Meet ‘Grim Vision’

An authoritative new study sets out a grim vision of what lies ahead: climate change will cause shortages of food and goods, inciting violence, potentially provoking much of civilization to collapse.

This blunt warning is the heart of the 2009 State of the Future study from the UN’s Millennium Project. The report, which will be made public in August, is based on the input of 2,700 researchers, and backed by a range of organizations including UNESCO, the World Bank, and the US Army.

According to the report, “The scope and scale of the future effects of climate change – ranging from changes in weather patterns to loss of livelihoods and disappearing states – has unprecedented implications for political and social stability.”

The immediate problems are rising food and energy prices, shortages of water and increasing migrations “due to political, environmental and economic conditions,” which could plunge half the world into social instability and violence.

The report suggests the threats could also engender wise and healthy responses. “The good news is that the global financial crisis and climate change planning may be helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centered adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood…Many perceive the current economic disaster as an opportunity to invest in the next generation of greener technologies…and to put the world on course for a better future.”

What is good and healthy and helpful?

Leon Secatero

Reading the stark forecasts from this report put me in mind – thankfully — of someone I knew and admired, the late Leon Secatero of the Canoncito Band of Navajo, To’Hajiilee, New Mexico. Whenever Leon would hear pronouncements of inevitable doom, he would acknowledge the potential, then respond calmly.

In one of our conversations back in 2005, Grandfather Leon spoke with me about the future. “The journey we are beginning now is for the next 500 years. What will be the sacred path that people will walk over the next 500 years? Even in the midst of all the changes taking place and all the things falling apart, we are building that foundation now. That’s something important for us to remember and to focus on. If we don’t do it, no one else will.

“All anyone needs to do is look around,” Leon said. “We have been destroying nature systematically for many decades. Now nature is destroying us with winds and storms and earthquakes and volcanoes. All that was known a long time ago. The elders have been telling us for years that this would come. Now it’s here and it’s hurting us.

“We need to take a close look at this and then really come to terms with ourselves,” Leon said. “To move ahead into the next 500 years we must leave some things behind or they will contaminate or even eliminate the future. We cannot go forward if we keep destroying the earth. But we must also ask, what is good and healthy and helpful? Those good things can be part of our foundation, part of our pathway into the next 500 years…”

There is a growing cohort of people who are actively asking these questions, and responding creatively. I have come to think of them as the Millennial Agrarians, and they got a nod of acknowledgement this week from USA Today.

In the story, reporter Elizabeth Weise wrote “Agriculture specialists say there is a burgeoning movement in which young people — most of whom come from cities and suburbs — are taking up what may be the world’s oldest profession: organic farming.

“The wave of young farmers on tiny farms is too new and too small to have turned up significantly in USDA statistics, but people in the farming world acknowledge there’s something afoot.

“For these new farmers, going back to the land isn’t a rejection of conventional society, but an embrace of growing crops and raising animals for market as an honorable, important career choice.”

In the face of the grim vision described by the researchers involved with the State of the Future report, these Millennial Agrarians are an embodiment of hope. We are going to need millions more people – perhaps as many as 80 to 100 million more – to face what is happening in our world, and to respond intelligently to the call of the land.

Headed for a Breakdown in our Food System ?

As fireworks creased the sky on July 4, writer David Beers posted his interview with Michael Pollan on Alternet, an interview that serves as a digital omen of things to come. Pollan, the best-selling author of In Defense of Food and other works, spoke in the interview about an open secret – that is, a secret open to anyone paying attention to our land, our economy, and our food.

Commenting within the context of scarcer oil, degrading ecologies, wobbling economies and global warming, Pollan observed: “When we say the food system is unsustainable we mean that there is something about it, an internal contradiction, that means it can’t go on the way it is without it breaking up. And I firmly believe there will be a breakdown…”

“…One of the reasons we need to nurture several different ways of feeding ourselves — local, organic, pasture-based meats, and so on – is that we don’t know what we’re going to need and we don’t know what is going to work.

“To the extent that we diversify the food economy, we will be that much more resilient. Because there will be shocks. We know that…We’re going to need alternatives around.”

Thousands of people – I think of them as the Millennial Agrarians  — already recognize this looming potential for our food system to break down, and they are taking creative action on the land to cultivate alternatives.

Will Allen

Among these agrarians, Will Allen of Growing Power farm and land trust in Milwaukee has emerged as leader in urban farming. He has been acknowledged and supported by the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and by a Fellowship Grant (Genius Grant) from The MacArthur Foundation.

On July 1, in a reflection of the deepening public interest in agrarian matters, Allen was profiled in the Sunday Magazine of The New York Times.

The Times correspondent wrote: “Propelled by alarming rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity, by food-safety scares and rising awareness of industrial agriculture’s environmental footprint, the food movement seems finally to have met its moment. First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack have planted organic vegetable gardens. Roof gardens are sprouting nationwide. Community gardens have waiting lists. Seed houses and canning suppliers are oversold.”

Will Allen is one of the people helping to lead not a mere ‘food movement,’ but something much larger: an agrarian reformation. the way. He is in the company of thousands of other Millennial Agrarians, a class of citizens on the rise.

The many people and organizations cited in The Call of the Land offer more than philosophical ideals. They are demonstrating an array of proven models, paths, and networks that embrace an evolving agrarian ethos and that can be emulated widely now.

Many of those who hear and heed Michael Pollan’s message, and the facts his warning is based upon, are choosing to take a stand with the emerging agrarians of the 21st Century.

A Billion Hungry People on Earth, More Coming Fast

The United Nations World Food Program reported this week that there are over a billion hungry people among the approximately 6.8 billion human beings now alive. That means that over one in seven of us is hungry or starving, and the number is rapidly climbing upward

“This year we are clocking in on average four million new hungry people a week, people who are urgently hungry,” according to Josette Sheeran, head of the UN Program.

At the G8 food summit in Rome last week, she told Reuters news service that high food prices have pushed another 105 million people into hunger in the first half of 2009.

The global financial crisis has made things worse. In terms of staple food, people in poorer countries today can only afford about a third of what they could afford three years ago.

Meanwhile, in an independent but equally ominous echo, the esteemed National Geongraphic has just published a special report on food and hunger – the end of plenty. “Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wake-up call for the planet,” Joel K. Bourne Jr. reported in the magazine.

“High prices are the ultimate signal that demand is outstripping supply, that there is simply not enough food to go around.”

Yet with world population spiraling toward nine billion by mid-century, these experts now say we need a repeat performance, doubling current food production by 2030.

In other words, we need another green revolution. And we need it in half the time. We also need it to be a clean, sustainable revolution, for the synthetic chemicals of the first ‘green revolution’ have proven themselves to be toxic and at variance with a healthy planet; the hybrid crops have shown themselves to be fragile; and ongoing overdoses of chemical fertilizer and pesticides have ruined vast stretches of agricultural terrain, and are suspected carcinogens.

Last year a massive study called the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development concluded that the immense production increases brought about by science and technology in the past 30 years have failed to improve food access for many of the world’s poor. The six-year study, involving some 400 agricultural experts from around the globe, called for a paradigm shift in agriculture toward more sustainable and ecologically friendly practices.

Though many people still do not hear it yet, hunger is one of the loudest voices calling from our land. This blog, and in particular the links page, offer direction and models that can be emulated by awakened citizens who recognize the wisdom of taking action now for food security.

Food and Farms Emerge as Key Movement of Our Era

If all politics is personal, as is widely held, then ultimately not much is more political than our food, and the farms which produce it. Everyone must eat, thus everyone has a vested interest in food.

Just now, early in the 21st Century, foods and farms are emerging as a leading-edge political movement. Thousands of college students are awake to the crucial importance of food and farms, and more are awakening.

With food poisoning scares, the ongoing onslaught of genetically modified food products being surreptitiously introduced to our diets, and the mounting evidence of the health and environmental consequences of large-scale, chemically dependent industrial agriculture, the list of reasons is growing for people to become active and take a direct part in ensuring food quality and food supply.

According to a May 23 story in The New York Times, a new wave of students is heading to farms this summer, in search of both work as interns, and social change. The interest in summer farm work among college students has never been as high, concurs the growing organization Organic Volunteers.

According to the Times, the students come armed with little more than soft hands and dog-eared copies of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. They are acutely aware of the gross environmental problems caused by mass-scale industrial agriculture; they want to help bring about change, and to know they are doing something to better the world.

Meanwhile, the dietary forces impelling people to recognize foods and farms as a key political issue are mounting in strength and credibility. According to stories in both Time Magazine and Mother Earth News, we now have solid, scientific evidence that industrial farming is giving us less healthy  food. Produce in the  U.S. not only tastes worse than it did in our grandparents’ days, the evidence shows it also contains fewer nutrients.

Both articles cite a February, 2009 study entitled “Declining Fruit and Vegetable Nutrient Composition,” by Dr. Donald R. Davis published in the journal HortScience, 2009.

Davis reports that the average vegetable found in today’s supermarket is anywhere from 5% to 40% lower in minerals than those harvested just 50 years ago.

Because of widely used chemical fertilizers and pesticides, modern crops are harvested faster than ever before. But quick and early harvests mean the produce has less time to absorb nutrients either from synthesis or the soil. Meanwhile, monoculture – another hallmark of the Big Ag industry – has also led to soil-mineral depletion, which, in turn, affects the nutrient content of crops.

What can we do? Follow the examples of the new agrarians of the 21st Century. They continue to respond intelligently, creatively, and innovatively in backyards, neighborhoods, and with community gardens and farms across the land.

Changing economic conditions represent yet a third force making it likely many more people will be looking for the practical and political pathways being trailblazed by the new agrarians.  For example, a May 24 story in The Hartford Courant told of how – in the face of drastically changing economics – local growers have begun offering CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) shares as a survival strategy to keep their farms alive..

CSA describes an emerging agrarian form that has swept the country since the first two CSA farms were established in 1978. The number of CSA farms is barely keeping up with demand. As reported elsewhere on this blog, CSA farms have increased dramatically in recent years, with more than 13,000 now operating in the USA according to a census taken by the US Department of Agriculture.

We can expect to see more in the times ahead as, of necessity, food and farms come to the forefront of public awareness.

Global Farm Grab Vs. Our Native Need for Food

In a disquieting rush to secure food supplies, financial speculators around the world are gobbling up farmland in developing nations and causing land prices to soar. Some call it the new colonialism, but most just call it an old-fashioned land grab.

Land grabbing and food speculation are not just overseas phenomena; they are also happening in North America. Mammoth investment funds have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial markets for commodities like wheat, corn and soybeans, establishing higher prices for consumers and fatter profits for themselves. Other private investors have made bolder, longer-term speculative bets that the world’s inescapable need for food will soon intensify; they are grabbing ownership not just of farmland, but also of fertilizer supplies, grain elevators, and shipping equipment.

This global grab of farmland and supplies raises fundamental questions, for it arises in the context of a worldwide recession born of a crisis in faith (the credit markets), a crisis in shelter (housing), unstable fuel cost, and widespread hunger. Now there are ominous signs of worsening food crisis in the making this year, spurred in part by the ongoing credit crunch that has made it difficult for farmers to get loans, and severe drought in many agricultural zones.

Thus, this week the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is holding a conference in Washington provocatively called “Land Grab: The Race for the World’s Farmlands.“

A old-fashioned grab: the Oklahoma land rush of 1889

Note well that the soaring price of rice and wheat over the past two years has sparked riots in more than 30 countries from India to Haiti. Those riots were an initial motivator for the land grab, but it really took off at the end of last year when many big food-exporting nations introduced export controls to ensure that food stayed close to home where it was needed.

Meanwhile, the land-food picture is further challenged by the privatization of water by multinational corporations, and by the specter of drought, which continues to loom over many of Earth’s most productive agricultural regions, including California, Texas, Argentina and China.

All these developments have drawn avid attention in commodity markets, where analysts warn bluntly that substantial price hikes for food are coming. When speculators see an opportunity to make money, historically they have acted out of self-interest and driven prices even higher to increase their profit margin.

The average family in North America does not fully see or feel these titanic changes yet,  but they will — inevitably, and likely before the year ends. Our need for food, water, and clean air are fundamental, foundational, inescapable.

Yet in the midst of change, in the midst of rampant consolidation for profit, we have before us other pathways – pathways that lead to better places.

How to respond? Many models and pathways of healthy, sustainable response are already established and available as models. Dozens of them are mentioned in this blog and in particular on the Links page.

Immediate, swift, well-planned and sustained action from citizens can establish clean, healthy, local food systems at the level of individual household, neighborhood, community, city, and region. With high technology, all of these individual, local nodes can be networked, streamlined, and maintained to yield clean food and fields for all the people, rather than manipulating land and food as collateral to produce monetary profits for a few.

As expressed by Eduardo Galeano in an earlier post on this blog, the tendency of the industrial world has been to regard a fundamental element of our native heritage — sharing of the land and resources — as somehow deficient or wrongheaded because it involves no self-interested profit incentive. But free-will cooperation and sharing can help us to establish working systems of food production and food preparation, while also establishing networks of agrarian oases that radiate good environmental health in the towns and cities where we live.

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” – Also Leopold

The philosophical foundation for the cultural values that existed in many native cultures is that nobody owns the land. It belongs to all. You have the right to use the land. If you have energy, motivation, and ability to work this earth and to take care of it as a steward — bearing in mind and expressing through action respect for the next seven generations of children to be born — then you have a right to use it.

As Trauger Groh and I posited when we wrote Farms of Tomorrow, every human being has a legitimate, native interest, and a basic, unavoidable need to draw sustenance from the land. Thus, we must raise questions and work toward an equitable basis for our legal relationship with the land, because upon this foundation depend our lives, our health, and the character of our relationships with other human beings.

How will we relate to the land? As conquerors, subjugators, and profiteers? Or as stewards who recognize our absolute dependence upon the land for life and growth, who accept our need to be fair and honest with one another, and who act accordingly.

Over many decades the practice of using land as collateral for debt — placing farmland under the burden of a bank mortgage to obtain cash to run the farm — has caused profound difficulty for farmers, and vast suffering. Under this system banks must be paid every month and every year, no matter the weather or the market conditions faced by the farmers. As a consequence, over time – thousands upon thousands of people have been driven from the caretaking of the Earth by the onus of debt. The land grab taking place right now around our globe, driving land, fertilizer, storage, and shipping costs higher, is poised to become an overwhelmingly dominant factor in all of our lives.

Because land is the basis of our physical existence, we need new thinking and new approaches in the way we hold and steward the land.

One possibility, which has been steadily gaining ground, is to gradually protect land suitable for agriculture by purchasing it for the last time and protecting the land for agricultural use through legal, free-will institutions such as land trusts.

To do this, farmland has to be purchased for the final time, and then, out of the free initiative of local people, be placed into forms of trust that protect it from ever again being mortgaged or sold for the sake of private profit. Those non-profit land trusts can then make the land available to qualified people who want to farm the land to provide clean, local food for people (for more information see the Land Trust Alliance, and the American Farmland Trust). Landowners themselves can form such land trusts, or groups of citizens, or churches, or other creative constellations of free men and women, can cooperate locally to buy available land for ecologically sound farming.

This cooperative approach to the land is something that clearly cannot be legislated or otherwise imposed in any way upon humanity. To be acceptable to the diverse populations that share the land, to succeed, every step of progress will have to arise out of the insight, the choice, and the free, honest initiative of people who recognize what is happening to our land and who also recognize the opportunity to take action and follow another pathway forward.