December 10, 2005 link
Well…due to circumstances beyond my control, I moved to a new apartment. Unfortunately, the new place has no yard for gardening. I searched high and low for a suitable apartment with adjacent growing space, but of course those scenarios are precious commodities in the city.
What does this mean for The Great Growing Experiment? I’m not sure. Obviously, the literal meaning of the project is no longer valid. I’m no longer transforming an urban lot into a food garden. But it doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest.
I still want to keep my experiment going, but it will be on-hold for a while. Maybe I can find a nearby place to lease a small plot, or maybe I’ll join some sort of community garden group.
I’m planning to keep publishing this web site, but I haven’t decided exactly what it will be about. For those readers who have followed my gardening misadventures over the past few years, you’ve noticed that I started writing more and more about agricultural issues, urban planning and my crazy ideas for agrarian-inclusive cities. I plan to keep writing about these ideas (I have a whole file-folder full of media clippings and essay ideas), but I also don’t want this blog to become too abstract. I want to keep it grounded in my everyday experiences.
Or I could ditch the personal experiences and broaden my focus to related issues, such as global warming, peak oil, natural history and ecology. But there are plenty of other great blogs dealing with these topics. I’ve tried really hard to avoid being preachy or strident on this site, and I’m wary of crossing that line. (Perhaps I already have, so what’s the difference?)
So that’s my dillemma—how to write about food and nature from a personal perspective when my personal experiences are no longer unique or interesting.
What do you think I should do?
November 1, 2005 link
Today is November 1st, and I’m still picking green beans and tomatoes. The weather has been so mild. Normally, we have a hard frost by this time of year. This time around, I’ve still got flowers on the bean vines and big red tomatoes ripening on the vine. Because of the cool temps, the flavor isn’t so great—but I ain’t complaining.
I’ve also got collards, broccoli and parsnips, which love this cool weather.
October 14, 2005 link
I am looking for a new apartment on the North and/or West side of Chicago. If anybody out there can recommend a good place, I would really appreciate it. Space for a garden would be nice, but it is not required. Thanks!
September 20, 2005 link
The broccoli heads are starting to form. I’ve never quite understood why it takes my broccoli so long to mature. The seed packets say 55 days until maturity. I planted mine in April. Maybe it has something to do with the partial shade.
The seed packets also say broccoli hates warm weather, but my plants grow bigger and bigger even during the dog days of summer. They don’t seem to mind.
Maybe it’s a stretch, but indirectly, I suppose this supports Wendell Berry’s argument that industrial farming ultimately fails because it imposes a one-size-fits-all growing program on each particular crop, rather than allowing for the variances of each micro-location. “The land is too various in its kinds, climates, conditions, declivities, aspects, and histories to conform to any generalized understanding or to prosper under generalized treatment”, he says in The Unsettling of America. You just never know how a particular plant will respond to certain conditions unless you try growing it on a small scale.
September 16, 2005 link
Earlier this week, I attended a special advance screening of The Real Dirt on Farmer John, a documentary feature film about a Northern Illinois farmer’s struggle to save his family farm. The subject of the film, John Peterson, attended the screening and hosted a Q/A session after the film.
I liked the movie, especially the fact that its setting was so familiar to me. It reminded me of my childhood on the outer fringes of Chicago’s western suburbs, watching farms transform one-by-one into housing subdivisions. While viewing the film, I imagined similar stories taking place among my rural neighbors in the 1980s.
On one hand, John’s story is inspiring, as he battles the odds to bring his farm back from the dead. On the other hand, it’s really depressing, because you realize that his survival is the exception, rather than the rule. So many other farmers—lacking John’s blend of miraculous luck, stubbornness, lunacy and family support—didn’t make it. His experience, while inspiring, underscores the dire situation for family farmers throughout the past 30 years.
One of the moments that struck me the most was watching a hardened old farmer (one of John’s neighbors) break down as he laments how “they poured concrete over all the good soil”. He mourns not for his personal losses, but for the losses of future generations.
If anything bothered me about the film, it was that it never addresses the root causes of the farm crisis. It seems to present the failure of small farms as part of the inevitable course of progress, rather than the result of misguided government policies, harmful technological “innovations”, corporate greed and inflexible banks. There are specific reasons why John and his neighbors are struggling, and it’s more than just times a-changin’.
The filmmakers hope that The Real Dirt will gather enough grassroots support to warrant a national distribution deal. If that happens, I hope it will provoke a dialogue about the plight of small farmers, rather than just being a fun story about one man’s triumph over adversity. Because the film does not ask any tough questions about the root causes, I fear that it will become just another feel-good story rather than a wake-up call.
Have you seen this movie? What did you think?
September 13, 2005 link
I’ve noticed lots of monarch butterflies in Chicago this year. Today, while watering the garden, I counted 4 separate monarchs.
After a quick Interweb search, it seems the conventional wisdom is that drought conditions (like we’ve had this Summer) should reduce the number of monarchs. This is because there will be fewer healthy milkweed plants, which provide food for monarch caterpillars. Because of our drought, we should have fewer milkweeds, and fewer monarchs.
I don’t have any milkweed in my yard. So where are all these butterflies coming from?
September 11, 2005 link
What’s wrong with subsidies? Part 2. My last entry discussed the ways in which corn subsidies are hurting American family farmers, and encouraging the growth of industrial monoculture farms. Some readers may feel it is an unfair assumption to imply that industrial operations are inherently bad. What about the inevitable triumph of “free market capitalism”? What about the “efficiencies” of large operations, and the low prices for consumers? How can this be a bad thing?
Well, first you should recognize that the agricultural subsidies are not promoting free market capitalism by any means. They are, in fact, government policies that favor a particular class of business. In this case, the policies favor the big corn farmers.
Or maybe you’re thinking, “It’s certainly too bad for the farmers, but the farm crisis doesn’t really affect me. It’s an arcane legal battle between Congress and farmers.”. Consider this:
- Three-fifths of Americans are overweight. The major factor in this transformation is overproduction of corn. In some form, it is in almost everything we eat. We have so much of the stuff (and it’s so cheap), that the food industry is trying everything to get rid of it. High-fructose corn syrup is everywhere. Most beef and chicken are raised on corn, even when their biologies are unsuited for grain consumption. Products derived from corn are so cheap that we can afford to offer super, mega-sized portions. It is difficult to even buy a moderate-sized portion of food, anywhere. Each of us is eating more than 200 extra calories per day. We gotta do something with all this extra corn.
- Our entire economy is based on cheap fossil fuels, which are rapidly depleting, and which we are now competing with China for access to. It is also based largely on corn. By economy, we don’t mean people driving to work everyday. We mean production and transportation of farm products—the basis of civilization. Corn, more than any other crop, is highly-dependent on petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. It is also so abundant that we must transport it all over the world to get rid of it, or apply energy to transform it into something else (cornstarch, dextrose, corn syrup, corn oil, beef, chicken). In one way or another, we can trace almost any economic activity in America to oil and corn.
- If we lose access to Middle-Eastern oil, we lose the ability to grow, ship and process corn. Without corn, we don’t have beef; we don’t have chicken. We have no restaurant industry, no soft drinks or energy drinks, no snacks, chips or breakfast cereals. No Kraft, no General Mills, no supermarkets. No ethanol either—it’s made from corn.
It is, of course, possible to grown corn without fossil fuel inputs, but at nowhere near the levels it is produced today. If we want to reduce obesity, reduce foreign oil dependence and address environmental degradation, we need to start scaling back our out-of-control corn production.
And here’s where subsidies come in. We need to progressively scale-back the corn subsidies, to allow a more diverse, locally-based agriculture to rise again. We need to allow our value-added industries the time to start developing better ways of satisfying customers—without cheap supersized portions—by focusing on quality over quantity. At the same time, we need to make sure that industrial corn production doesn’t just shift overseas.
Cheap corn is so vital to our current world, but it doesn’t have to be. We did pretty well before corn subsidies existed, and we’re smart enough to rebuild diverse regional economies without corn surpluses.
Those are a few reasons why I’m spending so much time writing about the 2007 Farm Bill. It’s not just an obscure legislative battle; it’s an important decision regarding the future of food and health.
September 7, 2005 link
What’s wrong with subsidies? The purpose of government subsidies is to help an important sector during a crisis or to encourage growth. This is generally in the form of tax breaks, price controls, legal loopholes or investment in related industries.
When we first consider the “farm crisis” in America, subsidies sound like a good idea. Surely, anything that helps farmers earn a living must be a good idea, right?
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Our current policies were formed during the Depression, and are sorely outdated. Each year, we’ve seen the problems get worse.
The current policy guarantees that the government will buy a certain amount of grain (particularly corn) from farmers each year, regardless of market demands. As a result, American farms produce a surplus of corn each year—some of which simply goes to waste. Because we have so much extra corn, the market value of corn is ridiculously low. It is cheaper to buy corn than to produce it.
The only way to be financially successful as a conventional farmer is to create “economies of scale” by consolidating land into huge industrial operations. These mega monocultures require large amounts of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, at great environmental cost. At the same time, the consolidation of land holdings leaves countless small town economies in ruins.
Subsidies aggravate the conditions even further, because the qualifications for receiving them are slanted toward large industrial farms, rather than small diversified family farms. Only 8 percent of the producers receive 78 percent of the subsidies. Sixty percent of farmers don’t receive any subsidy at all. Quite simply, today’s family farmers cannot earn a living under the current subsidy regime.
If we care about healthy agriculture and rural communities in this country, then why haven’t we revisited our policies for the last 70 years? Well…blame it on the usual suspects: strong corporate lobbying, lack of public education or media coverage, inertia.
The hopeful news is that legislators are beginning work on the 2007 Farm Bill. There is a chance that we can reverse the subsidy qualifications to favor small farmers. If this happens, we will be taking the first small step to correct the imbalances of the past 70 years.
For more information, check out this article from Farm Aid.
