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’ published October 4

I am pleased to announce that my new book, The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century, is published as of Sunday, October 4, 2009. Readers and bookstores can learn more and purchase copies of the book here.

The Call of the Land is a concise sourcebook — a primer — exploring dozens of positive pathways for food security, economic stability, environmental health, and cultural renewal. I wrote it over the last two years in direct response to the challenges before us.

Food Bank Farm’s Recipes for Success

Correspondent Michelle Collins writes in the Nashua Telegraph, telling of how a New Hampshire based project is growing clean food for hungry families, enhancing the beauty and productivity of local land, and creating dignified jobs in nature. The farm is part of the New Hampshire Food Bank’s Recipe for Success program.

Similar agrarian initiatives are sprouting with creative innovation all over the North America, and in Europe as well. As economic conditions continue to shift, many other communities will want to study these models to consider what would work best for their land.

Do What Needs to Be Done: Restore the Earth.

“At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. “

I really like that quote. It comes from a commencement address that Paul Hawken delivered to the 2009 graduating class at Oregon’s Portland State University on May 3.

Paul Hawken

Hawken has a long track record of healing enterprise. He opened the first natural food store in America, and built it into Erewhon, a national supplier of natural-foods.  After that he founded Smith & Hawken, selling high quality garden tools. Then he wrote Natural Capital, following that with The Ecology of Commerce. These books evolved into the Natural Capital Institute.

“There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive,” Hawken told the graduates. “In case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are brilliant, and the Earth is hiring…

“… here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.”

Hawken pointed out that the next industrial revolution, like the first one, will be a response to changing patterns of scarcity. It will create upheaval, but it will also create opportunity. Hawken has set up an online community called Wiser Earth, sort of a Wikipedia listing and interconnecting thousands of environmental and social justice movements and putting them into historical context.

The 21st Century agrarians who are cited on this blog, and in The Call of the Land, are people and organizations who see the necessity and the benefit of those opportunities, and who are responding creatively.  Their restorative projects are cited throughout this blog, and on the Links page, and serve as models.

In closing his commencement address, Hawken reminded the graduates: “There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true.”   21st Century agrarians are busy planting trees, and vegetables, and then checking the facts.

Hawken’s most recent book is Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World (2008). The text of his May, 2009 commencement address is here.

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.

When your garden runneth over: Veggie Trader

Veggie Trader is a new website that may well earn a place of esteem in the hearts and modems of gardeners and farmers across the fruited plains.

The innovative website arose from an exceedingly juicy lemon tree that rarely got picked. The lonely lemons inspired gardeners from East and West to consider the question: how could we help ensure that all the extra food people grow gets used and enjoyed?

The Veggie Trader website is their pilot effort to see if they can help more families eat well, make the most of the environment, and put more backyards to work for the benefit of neighbors, community and country.

Veggie Trader is free and easy. It works like classified advertising. You register, then post a listing describing the excess produce you have and what you’d like in return, and then you wait for a response…

Or, if you’re looking for local produce, you simply enter your zipcode and see what your neighbors have available. You can also post specific produce you’re looking for in our Wanted section and see which of your neighbors answers your request.

The Veggie Trader website lets registered users sell, barter or give away your extra veggies to other member who live nearby. The free registration also lets you develop networks so that those who have too many cucumbers can find people willing to swap some tomatoes in exchange.

A Model: City-wide Kitchen Scraps to Compost

I caught the CBS Evening news for April 15, 2009. The broadcast featured a  story about hundreds of restaurants around San Francisco. The restaurants are routinely donating their leftover kitchen scraps to create tons of fresh, organic compost for California farms.

Together the restaurants contribute as much as 300 tons a day of clean vegetable waste that is collected, composted in intensive, large-scale batches, and then sold at $400 a truckload to local farmers.

The report gets the story of this particular 21st Century agrarian model out widely for public consideration, and that’s positive. But to my eye it appeared that the producers of the news clip juxtaposed images of clean kitchen compost with images of city garbage heaps,  giving the impression that compost and garbage are one in the same thing. For the record, garbage has no place in a compost bucket or pile. That’s an important point. Good organic farms depend on clean, life-filled compost to grow future crops of clean food. The participating restaurants seem to be well aware of this crucial distinction.

I recommend sitting back for three minutes to watch the online video clip of this story.  It offers a clear and positive video explortion of a medium-scale model that other communities may want to consider.

As Land & Climate Degrade, Urban Farms Take Root

The journal Soil Use and Management has just published a study that measures the scope and severity of land degradation across the globe. The study concludes that 24% of our earthly land area – land that had been productive — is now degraded.

Degradation means a marked decline in soil, water and vegetation – the capacity to support life. The study concludes that the decline is driven downward primarily by defective land management and the onslaught of natural catastrophe.

This blunt, ugly fact – one-quarter of our land degraded in the last 30 years — directly impacts our ability to produce food and to enjoy the security and upliftment of a healthy planet.

Wilkins ice shelf collapse

Meanwhile, hundreds of square kilometers of the Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica disintegrated on Saturday, April 4. Scientists are stunned. Nine other shelves have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic Peninsula in the past 50 years, the arctic ice is thinner than ever, and worldwide glaciers are melting more speedily than scientists anticipated.

U.S. Secretary Ken Salazar put it plainly in a statement from the Department of the Interior: “The rapid retreat of glaciers demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing — more rapidly than previously known — as a consequence of climate change.”

Our land massively degraded, our poles wobbling and disintegrating from climate change, and our national and global economies in the midst of immense metamorphosis. These are catastrophic cries from the land.

In measured response to the context of our environment and our economy, thousands of urban and suburban community gardens and farms have taken root in North America over the last 15-20 years.

An urban farm

Community farms and gardens – located in cities, suburbs and countryside – have established pathways that can lead to a healthy, sustainable foundation for our transition and our future. These farms and gardens are keystone models that – if widely emulated – can help us address step by steady step our crises of land and climate degradation, as well as a host of economic and dietary imperatives.

The existing and emerging agrarian models are oases of environmental health and stability. They bear potential to radiate out widely across the land as they are emulated, improved upon, and refined into networks.

Stories about these keystone agrarian models continue to appear in US and Canadian media, as well as internationally. These are not just good ideas and projects, they are essential.

Here are some notes and links on urban agrarian endeavors recently in the news. More models and resources are available on the Links page of this blog.

One encouraging possibility for urban food production is being established in Detroit, Michigan, where Hantz Farms has set a goal of becoming the world’s largest organic, urban farm. Last week John Hantz unveiled an urban-development concept that would convert hundreds, even thousands, of vacant parcels of the city into urban agriculture.

In collaboration with Michigan State University and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Hantz proposal envisions what would be the first large-scale, sustainable farming operation in a major American metropolis. Hantz advocates that the farm can increase the tax base, create jobs, and improve the quality of life in an area that has experienced a severe decline in population.

Detroit is already home to hundreds of smaller community gardens. One significant non-profit group, Urban Farming, has been cultivating land in Detroit since 2005. Their mission is to create an abundance of food for people in need by planting gardens on unused land. They started out in 2005 with three gardens, but now have established about 600. Those gardens provide fresh, clean produce for about 50,000 people.

Phoenix, Arizona — the fifth largest city in America, a place of shimmering heat and parched land –- seems an unlikely domain to attempt living off the land. But with organic gardening and permaculture, Greg Peterson has transformed his patch of Phoenix into a productive Urban Farm – a source of clean, healthy land and food.

Just ¾ of an acre, Peterson’s Urban Farm is both a laboratory and classroom—what works there can be replicated by other desert gardeners, His goal is to make edible yards a standard for urban and suburban Phoenicians, and attendance at his courses is exploding.

Urban gardening and farming is building momentum because, in a time of stunning environmental and economic tremors, agrarian logic is undeniable.

Read All About It: Food & Farms Much in the News

Land and food are much in the news this season, and well they should be. The ongoing shocks and shifts in our economic foundations are jolting awake hordes of citizens to the absolute importance of the ways we care for the land and the ways we grow our food.

Many magazines and newspapers are offering in-depth stories to inform and educate the public about a range of 21st Century agrarian issues that are coming to the forefront, and that will likely occupy the forefront in the years ahead. To support readers in becoming informed, and then taking action, I offer the following roundup of significant snippets and links:

The March/April 2009 issue of Mother Jones magazine features a package of articles on what their editors think we need to do to grow enough healthy sustainable food at an affordable price.

What we grow, the magazine posits, is at the very core of how we live, how we run our economy, how we exist in the world.

The themed edition of Mother Jones, available online, includes an interview with agrarian journalist Michael Pollan. In the interview he observes: “I don’t know if organic is the last word. It’s sort of an all-or-nothing idea. People getting it partly right is very important…Let a thousand flowers bloom, and let’s see what works…The whole problem of industrial agriculture is putting all of your eggs in one basket. We need to diversify our food chains as well as our fields so that when some of them fail, we can still eat.”

According to writer Gwen Schantz in an article posted at AlterNet.org “industrial agriculture is sooo 20th century,”

She writes, “As America moves forward with a new agenda of change, our food system is getting a green, healthy makeover that promises to leave thousands of food and farm advocates with nothing to do…From a White House garden to rule changes at factory farms, the era of industrial ag calling the shots is changing.”

On March 22 the business section of the Sunday New York Times posed the question, ‘Is a Food Revolution Now in Season?’ Essentially, yes, the writer answered, asserting that sustainable-food campaigns have reached a critical mass of influence in the United States

The Times article quoted Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack  making note that the USDA’s recently released Census of Agriculture included more than 100,000 new small farmers. Vilsack said he wanted his agency to help develop regional distribution networks, so that produce from these small farms could be sold to institutional buyers like schools.

As part of the overall national economic stimulus plan, he said, the Agriculture Department plans to award $250 million in loan guarantees, spread over the next two years, for local and regional food networks.

Vilsack also told the Times that ultimately agriculture and food policy should fit into the administration’s planned overhaul of health care, by encouraging good nutrition as a basic way to prevent disease; and that agriculture should also be part of the effort to combat climate change, by encouraging renewable energy and conservation on farms.

The Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine is also dedicated to the Good Food Revolution, and offers a range of noteworthy artless on this theme.

Executive Editor Sarah van Gelder writes “…change is coming to food. As the global economy unravels, and as the implications of peak oil and climate change sink in, interest in alternatives to the current food system is growing. People are reconnecting with the land and with community, and rediscovering diverse, local, and organic practices. All over the world, people are standing up to the agro-industrial complex and calling for ‘food sovereignty’—the right to nourish and strengthen their families and communities, sustain their culture, build health, and protect biodiversity.

“A new generation of farmers is going local, opening farmers markets and bringing fresh foods to urban ‘food deserts.’ Schools are growing their own fruits and vegetables. Cities and towns are adopting food-friendly policies. Farmers and ranchers are turning to land management practices that protect and restore ecosystems.

The development that has generated the most press attention to the theme of agrarianism, at the level of the household, is the lead of the Obama Family, which is establishing an organic vegetable garden at the White House.

First Lady Michelle Obama and a team of children, chefs and gardeners began digging the (garden map) on the White House South Lawn on Friday, March 20. This is the first vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden during World War II.

White House chefs will use the produce to prepare meals for the family and for official functions, and some of the produce will be donated to Miriam’s Kitchen, a soup kitchen near the White House.

The example of the Obama family is generating widespread news coverage, and will likely inspire many thousands of people to follow their example.

Peak Oil is Here: Ag Alarms are Sounding

According to a widely respected energy blog, The Oil Drum, the long-prophesied phenomenon termed Peak Oil has already happened. It happened about a year ago, in mid-2008 at 81.73 million barrels of oil per day,

If The Oil Drum is correct, and there are lots of reasons to assume it is, then that means oil production declines from here on out, supply tightens and cost goes up

No doubt there will continue to be disagreements about the exact date of Peak Oil, but the posters at The Oil Drum are learned nerds and have earned a wide measure of respect in both business and academic realms. If they are off in their reckoning, they are likely not off by much.

The reality of declining oil supplies has – and will have – profound consequences for the small percentage of people who grow food, as well as for 100 percent of the people who eat food. The industrial agriculture system which now supplies the vast majority of our food depends absolutely on gas and oil not only to power the heavy equipment in the fields and the trucks used to ship it, but also for the production of petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides.

Changes in the cost of the raw material – oil – mean changes in the capacity of industrial farms to purchase and employ these fundamentally polluting materials. And that will mean changes for food cost, already a crisis according to Time Magazine, and for food supply in the years ahead.

Many householders, neighborhoods, urban and suburban communities already sense this change along with the reality of a recession in full swing and a fundamental shift in base of national and global economics. According to a recent story from the Associated Press, they are responding in droves.

AP reported that industry surveys show double-digit growth in the number of home gardeners this year and mail-order companies report such a tremendous demand that some have already run out of seeds for basic vegetables such as onions, tomatoes and peppers.

“People’s home grocery budget got absolutely shredded and now we’ve seen just this dramatic increase in the demand for our vegetable seeds. We’re selling out,” according to George Ball of Burpee Seeds, the largest mail-order seed company in the U.S. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

A new report by the National Gardening Association predicts a 19 percent increase in home gardening in 2009, based on spring seed sales data and a telephone survey. Community gardens nationwide are also seeing a surge of interest.

The Links page of this blog offers resources that can be employed now to develop gardens, community farms, and a host of other sustainable, earth-healing responses to Peak Oil, to the call of the wallet, and in general to the call of the land.