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.

Where to begin?

There are some things that have been swirling around in my head for some time now, but difficult to articulate.
I spend most of my time these days trying to build a supply chain from my family's ranch to consumers via farmer's markets, restaurants, and stores. I'm literally a poster-child for our local "buy local" campaign and can rattle off the arguments for buying local passionately. And yet I feel slightly hypocritical when I do so. The local food movement, the organic food movement are admirable things and I support them. But all the while I know that just buying local is not near enough. I thnk about the statistic that every farmer in the US feeds 120 people. 120. That is a heavy load to bear. I think about the producers that I know of, and the worry and frustration in their eyes. The worry is not just for our individual lives and businesses. It is about the system. We are very capable people - strong, disciplined, creative. But we can see that we cannot bear the load. That the burden is too great. That we cannot do what needs to be done with the resources of time, money, and energy that we have to offer. We can see that most people do not begin to fathom the social and physical infrastructure that makes the basic necessities of life available to them. We were all brought up to take our the necessities more or less for granted. We were brought up to work within a highly hierarchical system with jobs specialized and ranked. To get to the top of the food chain. To pick a career with the highest possibility of the highest wages. Nobody told you to think about where those wages were coming from. If it paid a lot of money then it must be important and necessary. And the necessities would be taken care of by paying other people to take care of them. Of course. So we have built a culture around the faulty premise that value will be assigned rationally. That the most important and necessary things will be valued the most. But that hasn't happened, not exactly. And so when the logic falls apart what will happen? That is the worry.

The frustration comes from the same source. Farmers and ranchers know that the more basic and necessary the food stuff, the less viable the business. We are frustrated that we are preyed upon by our own society. That none of our businesses quite "pencil out." That we bear the burden of a system that has evolved into nonsense, ignorance, and frivolity. These are bitter words and it pains me to say them. But they are true, I think.

And so what is the answer then, if buying local is not enough. It is to take responsibility at a deeper level. To help to make our world make sense again. To fight for the right to contribute. Not just as a consumer, but as a producer, a builder, a maker. And there is all the poetry and beauty in the world in that.

Secrets of the Mountains & Oddities of the Farmer's Market

This Dr. Seussish-looking plant is a rare native called opelu, like the fish. It was growing in the ravine that we hiked through in the forest (nearly a month ago now, it's scary that the months flash by like days). It is called opelu because the underside of the leaves have a silvery irridescence like the fish flashing in the water. It is the mauka incarnation of the makai fish body, in the Hawaiian poetry of names and things.

Last week I turned up at the Na'alehu farmer's market and there on my neighbors table (she sells jewelry) were four Buddha's hands, a variety of citron celebrated in Chinese culture for its fragrance. What are the odds of that? Supposedly there are only two trees on the island, and those four hands are the entire crop this year for one of those trees. I bought two. My friend Lorie Obra, the coffee grower, kept asking me "What do you do with it?" Lorie is Filipino and I'm half-Filipino, and that is the quintessential Filipino question. We are very pragmatic. My explanations about the Chinese aesthetic of qikuai or strangeness, was not satisfactory to her. So after appreciated the weirdness of my Buddha's hands for a few days, I chopped up the less weird one into little bits and candied it. Very yummy. I'll take it to the farmer's market today to reassure Lorie that I have not betrayed my Filipino values.