Organic Pt. 3

I'm trying to articulate, hopefully once and for all, the reasons for not jumping on the certified organic wagon. There are a lot of things that one just inherits from an agricultural upbringing - ways of perceiving, thinking, making decisions - that are ingrained into one's very consciousness and therefore hard to develop into words and arguments. I'd like to get it out and move on, really.
I don't want to go the organic route because the scale is all wrong for me. It seems like a micro-solution to a micro-problem. Part of the scale-thing is that we ranch on 10,000 acres, a good part of it infested with an invasive weed - the dreaded popoki - that sports poisoned talons on every milimeter of vine, twig, merest wisp of leaf. I reserve the right to retaliate in kind, even if it is bad karma. (Yes, I do have a Republican streak.)
But the other part of the question of scale has more to do with re-thinking our present paradigm. To go organic I would have to focus on technical questions, on figuring out how to do what I do with the products listed by the OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute). And, honestly, we've got bigger problems coming at us like a freight train in a tunnel. Or worse coming at our kids. Organic is going to be a moot point a whole lot sooner than we'd all like. The big question for me is not whether my own deal is or is not organic, it's whether we can think through the post peak-oil, post-global structural questions with nimble wit and gutsy fortitude in time for our kids to have a good kind of world. So that's what I'm going after. And organic, heirloom tomatoes will be in there someplace, I dearly hope.

Organic Matter

"More carbon is stored in soils than in all plants, all animals, and
the atmosphere combined. Soil organic matter contains
an estimated four times as much carbon as living plants.
In fact, carbon stored in all the world’s soils is over three
times the amount in the atmosphere. As soil organic
matter is depleted, it becomes a source of carbon dioxide
for the atmosphere. Also, when forests are cleared and
burned, a large amount of carbon dioxide is released. A
secondary, often larger, flush of carbon dioxide is emitted
from soil from the rapid depletion of soil organic matter
following conversion of forests to agricultural practices.
There is as much carbon in six inches of soil with 1%
organic matter as there is in the atmosphere above a field.
If organic matter decreases from 3% to 2%, the amount
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could double."

From Building Soils for Better Crops

Organic

People ask me all the time why don't I get organic certification for our ranch. I could probably ask for more dollars for our beef. Then again I'd probably price myself out of my local (Ka'u) market. But that's not the main reason. The main reason is that the idea of organic doesn't appeal to me. I mean I support it in general but I just can't get excited about it. Mainly I just see the certification process as a whole bunch more words to manipulate and papers to fill out in a world with way too many words and papers going around already. Something like that. But what does get me excited is soil science. Stuff like this from "The Living Soil" chapter of the SARE publication: Building Soils for Better Crops www.sare.org/publications/bsbh/bsbc.pdf Bugs, fungi, bacteria, slugs, nematodes...and cows.

Nothing

The best things about my life are not-things. I've chosen the life that I have -which is a pretty weird life compared to the average - because I can't live without those not-things. When I tell people that I live in Ka'u I often get this look of disbelief, because it is the no-where of no-where, the extreme boonies. But damn my life is so rich, I almost can't take it sometimes, and it is the stuff in Ka'u that makes it so rich. It's the community and when I say community it's just the closest English equivalent to something that tangles much deeper. It's the spirit of the land that is like endless music in the heart. It's the nothingness that lives.
Sometimes I think about trying to get other people to understand Ka'u and I feel like I have to create content to get people's attention - products, events, stories. But it's really missing the point. Ka'u is not about the content, it's about the anti-content. It's about that feeling that you'd be happy to spend the rest of your life, and several more lifetimes, if you had them, just trying to understand Ka'u. That it would take all your brains, heart, creativity and strength. That it would leave you weather-worn but complete. And that the best part of it would be way beyond words.

Crash Course

http://www.postcarbon.org/video/89646-the-crash-course-exponential-growth

All food producers should be respected

It really disturbs me that there is a tendency to bifurcate the agricultural world into bad farmers and good farmers. This mostly occurs amongst food commentators, not so much amongst actual farmers. The attention that is being placed on agriculture is a wonderful thing.
I hope that out of all of this attention a new generation of food producers will be born who will command the respect of their peers and who will help to shape a new culture that respects the land, each and every acre of it. I look forward to this new culture that is in love with the land and the ocean again. I hope that an innovative spirit will be brought to the practical questions of how we derive the most basic necessities from our natural environment sustainably and fairly. I dream of a day that we will see large numbers of highly productive and diverse farms on a human scale that can provide a good living for farmers.
I hope that farming becomes very, very cool. Even beyond that I hope that farmers become regular people again and not the slightly quaint folk that we are considered today. It is a deeply satisfying and incredibly challenging way of life. And however you manage to do it, if you can make it work, then it should be respected. Because whatever kind of farmer you are, at whatever scale, you will only make it work if you very accurately assess the place where you are farming, the resources that are available, the technology that is most appropriate, the presence and capacity of processing infrastructure and distribution channels, and not least, the audience for your product - your market, your consumers. Any farming operation has to be an accurate reflection of what is and what might be.

What's Really Going On

The politics of food is really big right now, which is just great. There's much talk of a food crisis. Seven million people watched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. There's an organic garden at the White House. It's an exciting time to be a food producer. We feel like Cinderella - maybe we'll actually get to dance with the Prince at last.

But you know, it isn't really a food crisis that we're having, no, not so much...America is having an identity crisis, a values crisis that we are projecting onto food. Everybody who's ever been a teenage girl knows that eating disorders are not actually about the food. It's about all the other stuff, the feelings we can't quite handle. We're scared out of wits because everything we see around us seems to depend on burning fossil fuel. Our cars, our clothes, our food, our houses. Our entire way of life. We get that out-of-control feeling.

We're a nation with an eating disorder. Because we were and are living a lie. You actually can't have an economy based on the service sector because, hello, that makes no sense! We can't all play the stock market because the stock market has to be based on something. Monopoly money is not real, and just because it looks like food doesn't mean that it actually is.

But you know food is a very basic thing and if we can get that right, if we can remember what food looks and tastes like, if we can find some integrity there, maybe it's a start.

So there's an opportunity here for food producers to push for a food system that makes sense, to help to heal our wayward culture, to seize the moment and offer something better, and at the same time demand that our own lives and lifework be better recognized and rewarded.

Careers in Agriculture

A telling moment today. I ran into a dear friend and mentor at the airport, a brilliant educator and advocate for gardening skills as a means of hands-on learning. She mentioned that she had received an offer from the Hawaii Community Fund for three scholarships for students majoring in agriculture. She had to turn down the offer because there was no one wanting to major in agriculture. Yes, that’s how bad it is. As long as I have been alive we have been punishing those who chose a life in agriculture with low wages and long hours, uncertain livelihoods and social condescension. Yes, punishing and for decades.

A practical example

of what I was trying to get at in my last post.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/us/28slaughter.html?ref=dining

In what could be a major setback for America’s local-food movement, championed by so-called locavores, independent farmers around the country say they are forced to make slaughter appointments before animals are born and to drive hundreds of miles to facilities, adding to their costs and causing stress to livestock.

This is a problem that I deal with everyday. It's a part of what I mean by saying that it's not enough to buy local. Is it the farmer's and rancher's responsibility to create the infrastructure necessary to get the food all the way onto the plate? Do farmers have the millions of dollars and more importantly, the time and stamina to get through the regulatory hurdles of putting this infrastructure into place? We are trying to get it done, but the obstacles are daunting. We could really use some help, and not just in the eating part.