Hi Everyone,
1. May Day celebration—Saturday May 3rd noon to four.
Although our weather of late hasn't been an indication, the calendar doesn't lie. May is almost here! Our May Day celebration will be on Saturday, May 3rd.
We are virtually certain it will be sunny and warm this year (Why? Because we deserve it!). Come join us from 12:00 to 4:00 to help us welcome in the new growing season. As always, we will have a maypole event for kids (and those who are young at heart!) The May Pole activity will start at 1:00. Other activities will include hay rides (1st hay-ride with farmer Erick will leave at 12:00 on the dot!) before and after the May Pole, a seed planting table for children to plant vegetables to take home, basket weaving activity, and farm walks with farmers Erick and Wendy.
We hope many of you will be able to join us. Feel free to bring a picnic lunch (I did guarantee nice weather, didn't I?) and friends and family that might have interest in our farm.
2. World Food Crisis
I recently read a thoughtful piece by Wendell Berry in Harper's magazine. In the article Berry notes that even though the signs of "peak oil" are all around us, our society seems to be in complete denial of the fact that with the loss of cheap energy, life for us is going to have to change—we're going to have to learn to live with less. Berry points out that most of us cling uncritically to the faith that science will come to the rescue, and that somehow our empire built on "endless economic expansion" will continue unabated. No one can deny that scenario is a logical possibility; but that belief seems to require a leap of faith because at present neither scientists nor anyone else seems to know where we go from here.
What we do know is that food has already begun to be in short supply in many countries of the world. This past week, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, issued a warning that food riots in Guinea, Egypt, Mexico, Haiti, and many other places are a harbinger of things to come. With food prices having risen by 85% in the last two years, and with supplies diminishing, many countries are facing severe shortages. Zoellick and the UN are both calling for massive aid to needy countries.
On a much more personal note, last week I got a call from my daughter, Laura, who many of you know. I hadn't talked to her for four months because she has been working with a "Doctors Without Boarders" relief team in a very remote part of Ethiopia. She was able to call because she and the rest of her team were temporarily expelled from Ethiopia (she is now in Egypt). She has worked in many parts of the world—two other stints in Africa—but this is the first time she has seen such widespread malnutrition and people literally starving to death. There is simply no food. I can tell you it is a heartbreaking thing for a dad to see his tenderhearted daughter brokenhearted while fighting a valiant but losing battle against both starvation and the diseases caused by malnutrition.
Certainly food shortages have happened before. But in the past those situations have generally been tied to drought or to some kind of natural or political disaster. The cause of food shortages today are believed to be the rising cost of fossil fuel (upon which modern, industrial farming is based), to the diversion of farm land to biofuel crops (which is also a result of the high cost of fossil fuel), and to climate change (which is also related to our historically unprecedented usage of fossil fuels).
Fortunately, many people are beginning to ask the questions that need to be asked: What will we do when fossil fuel doubles in price again? and again? Can we cure ourselves of our energy addiction before it is too late?
Quite clearly, the means of food production (high energy-requiring agribusiness) and the means of food distribution (high energy-requiring global trade) will have to change. Our inbox is deluged with articles and studies that come to the same conclusion: agriculture needs to become more sustainable, less dependent on fossil fuel, and less dependent on global markets. And the timeline is not "within decades," but, "now."
Some countries are developing a strategy of keeping their food production at home. This year many Asian counties are limiting the amount of staples they will export. Vietnam, for example, will export no more than 50% of its rice. At the same time, however, many people in the US are clamoring for greater liberalization and proliferation of free trade treaties.
Certainly wealthy countries benefit from importing inexpensive food from developing counties. In this way we can probably stave off the impacts of global food shortages for ourselves for a while (but only for a while, and not from the increased cost of food). But as the most vulnerable people in the world continue to see their food supplies diminish, we can be sure that the tensions and social unrest we are beginning to witness now will increase. Can developing countries continue to send their (now only "relatively") cheap food to the US when their own people don't have food to eat?
At one time in my life I held to an argument that seemed to make sense to me (then), and that I often hear advanced now. It claims that "if we don't buy [cheap] products from developing countries, their economies will stagnate and they won't be able to become first-world nations." While I still appreciate the sincerity of those who hold this position, I no longer believe it to be valid. I now see that there are two assumptions built into this line of thought that need to be questioned.
The first is the assumption that it is a good thing for developing countries to become first-world nations. Certainly the health benefits of the first-world are widely (and justifiably) touted. But there are also down-sides. International studies have found an inverse relationship between the amount of money people earn beyond a fairly low threshold required for sustenance and the degree of happiness they experience in their lives. These very substantive studies find that most of the things valued in the first world are actually detrimental to becoming happier people. (If you'd like more information on this, read Bill McKibben's book, Deep Economy, which makes and documents this argument.)
I don't know of any studies to this effect, but I wonder what light studies would shed on the question of whether people in developing countries who leave their indigenous ways to enter the world of global economies eat better than their parents did. I'm thinking again of Laura and her experience in Ethiopia. The people she works with are migrant workers who work the cotton and sorgum fields. They are involved in promoting global trade—the cotton they grow, for example, is exported to factories in the US. Cheap imports. And some Ethiopians, the few who own land, are doing well with global trade. But the roughly 100,000 migrant workers are literally starving to death.
The second assumption in what we might call the "argument for modernization" (which might also be called a "rationalization for economic imperialism") is the belief that the economies of developing countries will stagnate if they do not participate in global trade. I think anyone would have to say this assumption is at least questionable; I believe it is false.
It has certainly been the case that countries which developed economies based on global trade during the era of cheap fossil fuel have done well financially (even if the people in such countries are not become correspondingly "happier" and content with their lives). Another consideration is whether the "trickle down" theory is currently working (it doesn't seem to in Ethiopia, for example). But we no longer live in the era of cheap fossil fuel. Can we, therefore, defend our addiction to cheap imports by saying it allows developing countries to enter the world of global trade, a "land flowing with milk and honey"? This seems (to me) like someone in a dying industry who knowingly sells a business to a naďve young person who is unknowingly buying into a business that is doomed to failure. The fuel and correlative environmental costs today are too great for developing counties to get in on the windfall that was reaped by first world countries.
We are inviting them to a party that is winding down; by the time they spend all the money they have on the cover-charge, the party will very likely be over.
I have to admit that the world of global economics is probably more complicated and multifaceted than we realize. But it certainly seems like encouraging developing countries to establish local economies based on local food production would be wiser and in the best interest of the people there than promoting economies predicated on (cheap) fossil fuel that no longer exists. It might also be in the best interest of people in our own country. If Wendell Berry is right, the fact that we may have to learn to live with less may even end up making us happier and more content people.
3. Late Spring "off season" Session Starts April 30
The last of our four "off season," six-week Sessions (Late Spring Session) will be starting on April 30. If you would like to join us for this short Session before our Summer Session, you can do so by signing up on line. All boxes are delivered to depots during our off-season Sessions.
The deadline for Late Spring Session sign-up is noon Friday, April 25th.
4. Farm Building Project: we're in need of sub-Contractors
Wendy and I have been planning to build a home on the old farmstead site here (on the corner of E. Main and West Snoqualmie River Road SE) for more than five years. At long last the permitting process is almost complete.
We are going to be our own general contractors. One of us is the "general," the other is the "assistant general" –we're just not sure which of us is which. But what we are sure about is that we could use some help in finding the subcontractors we will need: foundation, framing, roofing, electrical, plumbing, heating, drywall, flooring, and all the rest.
Our intention is to build the house as "green" as possible. It will be a simple house—a two story rectangle with two large dormers on the front, a pop-out on the back, and a wrap-around porch. We see it as a composite, standard "Skagit valley" farm house.
We're not looking for charity. But we are looking for people who care about our farm, are knowledgeable in their fields, and that we can trust for honest advice and careful work.
We hope to be able to get several bids for each portion of the construction. If you are involved in the various construction trades and would be available to work on our home sometime this summer through winter we would love to talk to you (jubileefarm@hotmail.com).
5. Summer Session starts June 17th!
Our main, "Summer Session" will be starting this year on Tuesday, June 17th. Here's a run-down on the first week pick-up days and times:
Tuesday, June 17th: farm pick-up noon to six
Wednesday, June 18th: farm pick-up noon to four
Wednesday, June 18th: all delivered boxes at depots from noon to 7:00PM
Friday, June 20: farm pick-up noon to six
Saturday, June 21: farm pick-up ten to two
If you are unsure about what day you signed up for, or just don't know for sure what you need to do to get your box during the first week, please send us a note (jubileefarm@hotmail.com).
6. CSA Summer Session Handbook
We have written a "CSA Summer Session Handbook" (http://jubileefarm.org/handbooks/summer.html) for our CSA that is posted on our web page (www.jubileefarm.org). We hope that all of you will read it. It has a very easily accessible Q & A format. And since we are just filling cyberspace (and not utilizing potentially carbon sequestering materials), here are the questions that are answered in the Handbook:
7. Vacation Policy
Many new members ask about what to do when they miss weeks because of vacations. The answer to that question (like most of the questions we get) is in the Summer Session Handbook on our web page (see above—question # 6)!
The ideological answer is this: joining a CSA is not exactly like going to a grocery store. It is a commitment that exists between a consumer (you) and a farmer or farmers (Erick and Wendy). Our commitment to you is that each week during our growing season we will have a box of produce for you, our members. That's what we plan for. Nature (like most farmers) doesn't take a vacation during the growing season; once production starts, it continues.
So we have produce for you each week. We know that most of you vacation sometime during the growing season. But we are here, and your box is here. If you're not here to get it, you can have someone else pick it up for you. And we encourage you to do that. If you pick up at the farm, just have them check in with whoever is in the market on that day. Make sure you tell them to bring a box or cooler and the day and hours they should come. If you pick up your box at a depot, be sure to tell the person who picks up for you the place, day and time to pick up. Be sure too to tell them to get the box with your name on it (rather than, for example, someone else's name on it, which often happens and really messes up the system!).
If you don't have someone to whom you wish to ingratiate yourself by giving them your box while on vacation, you can drop us a note and we will take your box to HopeLink.
Those are the options you have. What we don't do is offer refunds for weeks missed, or give more produce in a later week for a missed week.
8. Impacts of a cold spring??
Not many of us can remember a colder April. It may turn out that none of us can. What has been the impact of this weather on the farm?
Well, there has been a certain amount of anxiety, and a lot of cold hands. But so far, I think we are doing pretty well. We've taken some precautions and preemptive measures that, as long as we get back to somewhat normal temperatures soon, will (I think) get us through this.
The most effective means we have at our disposal now that we didn't used to have (and that we still see new farmers struggling with) is that now, unlike past years, we are prepared for any "window of opportunity" that comes along—whenever it happens! In the past we always seemed to be flatfooted when those windows occurred; but not anymore! A week ago Saturday, for example, on our one, beautiful, glorious day of spring (so far, although we have one scheduled for our May Day, on May 3rd) it was more than tempting to do just what our crew did—leave the farm and play! It was Saturday, after all. But instead I prepared beds, and Wendy seeded carrots, beets, and spinach. By Monday morning it was raining again: window not just closed, but slammed shut!
The night before this last blast of abominable winter weather arrived the crew hung in and finished transplanting strawberries until 8:00. I disked until ten (having lights on the tractor is a blessing, but can also be a curse!). That was the last window for doing anything outside before the snow started falling.
Preemptively, we recognized early that it was going to be a tough spring, and have done some things differently. One thing we did was to pre-sprout all our peas. It's hard to get peas started in a spring like this. I was at a neighbor's farm and saw an entire bed that was a candidate for a complete replant. I wasn't surprised. I remember reading Steve Solomon (founder of Territorial Seed Company) commenting on the frustration people who grow on clay loam soils (like ours) have when it comes to peas. It just isn't easy. We've had our share of failures too.
I have never tried to pre-sprout an entire planting (1,500 row feet, or approximately nine thousand seeds), but this year we did. And (knock on wood) it worked! We put the seeds on burlap-covered large trays, sprinkled the seeds with an inoculant of microrhizonial fungi, covered them with wet burlap, and put them in the warm room. Four days later they were ready to plant! The problem was that we were then experiencing another downpour. So we took them out of the warm room, and just put them on "hold" for a whole week in the cold barn! When the "window" came, we were ready, and the seeds were more than ready. It was a Friday afternoon when we finally judged it dry enough to plant, and we got on it. We were a little faltering in our faith, but the sprouted peas were not to be denied, and are now a strong stand of bright green sprouts, heading for the sky. Even now I can see kids (and parents) happily picking bags of peas from those nine-thousand, hand-planted seeds.
There are many other examples of things we've done this year we don't normally do. It's really fun to find that as our horticultural understanding increases, we find we have options—even when the weather doesn't cooperate!
9. Canning Share
Our feeling was that our first year of the Canning Share (last year) was a great success. We learned a lot, and many of you did too. We have already heard some success stories, as well as reflections on the satisfaction of eating one's own canned goods through the winter. Most of our ancestors knew all about canning, and took great pride in a well-stocked pantry.
We will have more information in the next update, and the application for the canning share on-line soon.
10. How many Summer shares are available?
We've had some correspondence asking if it is true that we have already sold all the shares for this season. No, we haven't. But we have set a limit for this year. We just feel that we have to draw the line somewhere, and that we have set the limit of shares we can do at a level that is reasonable for our farm and for our level of experience as farmers.
We do still have a lot of shares available. But I should also say that we have significantly more members for the Summer Session signed up now than we usually have at this time of the year. We don't want to be alarmist—there's still time—but we do want to let you know that if you really want to be in our Summer Session, it would be good to get your application in soon.
11. The Subsidizing of Junk Food
The front page of Monday, April 21, 2008 Seattle Times carried an article entitled "The Crunch of Rising Food Prices."
One of the people interviewed lamented the rise in cost of organic milk, and said it has gotten so expensive she can't buy organically as much as she would like to. I've heard the same thing from a variety of sources: organic is too expensive, we can't afford it.
I can certainly understand these feelings, but I'd like to share a few thoughts about another way of thinking about the cost of organic whole foods compared to "conventionally" grown processed foods.
The alternative to "expensive" organic food is the less expensive non-organic (processed) food. I don't want to unduly pick on the person referenced in the Times article who complained that she couldn't afford organic, but if you look at two of the items she could afford to buy for her family, the two identifiable items (in the photos with the article) are frozen pizza and potato chips.
In the first place, I'm not even sure that frozen pizza and potato chips could/should be called "food." They are, as Michael Pollan calls them, "food-like imitations" whose content and nutritional value are both dubious in nature and character. But they are cheap. Or are they?
I would suggest that they are not "cheap" at all (except insofar as they are mere imitations of something that is real, which lends itself to "cheapness"). How can I say they are not cheap? Because the real cost is much higher than the selling price. We only pay for part of the cost when we buy them, but we do pay the full cost in other ways.
Processed, industrialized food-like products are subsidized in a variety of ways. I hate to generalize, but I think it is safe to say that 99.9% of all processed food uses high-fructose-corn-syrup (HFCS) as a significant ingredient. Corn, of course, is said to be America's greatest agricultural crop. The only problem is that it is not grown at a profit. The simple truth is that it costs a dollar a bushel more to grow corn than it can be sold for. Who makes up the difference? We, the taxpayers make up the difference. Our tax dollars go to agribusiness corporations to make up the difference between the cost to grow corn and what they can sell the corn for—plus profit, of course! So the processed, "food" that we buy because it costs less than organic food is typically only "cheap" because it is subsidized by taxpayer dollars. In other words, junk food is cheap not because it is junk (although, nutritionally, it may be that), but because we only pay part of the cost at the grocery store; we pay the rest on April 15th.
This is only part of the story, though. There are many other costs to the processed food whose empty calories we are willing to consume because it "costs less." The HFCS in processed foods is a produce of conventional farming. These farms use GMO corn, which has already had and will continue to have devastating environmental and health impacts. GMO corn is used because it is compatible with the heavy usage of herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers all of which pollute our rivers and air, kill our salmon and other aquatic life, and compromise our drinking water (among many other things). Not only are the calories of processed food "empty," they are expensive insofar as the environmental damages caused by their procurement must be paid by someone (now and later). Similarly, there is a health bill that must be paid. The resulting sicknesses and diseases caused by eating food-like imitations that lack nutrients generate costs to both health and, consequently, to productivity—losses to our economy due to the fact that people with nutritional-related illnesses can't work efficiently (or at all).
Is that enough? Maybe, but it's not the whole picture by a long-shot. Sixteen million acres of the best US farmland is devoted to growing corn that will become either HFCS or feed for animals (animals who, by the way, as a result of eating it are unhealthy and need to be slaughtered at a young age because they would die before maturity from abscessed livers caused by their feed if they were allowed to live that long!). These acres employ very few people. The people who used to farm these acres have been replaced by machines that consume immense amounts of fuel—fossil fuels, the same fossil fuels whose utilization contributes to global climate change that is yet another cost that will be faced in the near future. Remember too that the massive amounts of synthetic fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides that are used for corn crops are also petroleum based, requiring yet more fossil fuel.
More? Well, it would be hard to deny that US foreign policy is at least influenced by our need for fossil fuel. It may be too much to say the war that now "fuels" our national debt is simply about oil, but it certainly is a factor that explains our intense interest in the Middle East. Agricultural endeavors (agribusiness, commodity farming) constitute one of the largest users of fossil fuel in our country. Is it reasonable to think that our outlay of tax dollars for wars and other interventions might diminish if we were not utilizing fossil fuels to grow a commodity crop such as corn (our "greatest crop") that pollutes our waters and compromises the health of our people? Could not a portion of our war and foreign policy expenses also be seen to be an indirect subsidy of that "cheap" junk food that we must buy because organic is too expensive?
And what about the issue of food security? One of the costs of the availability of cheap, food-like imitations (processed foods) is that we have "farmed out" the production of our food to developing countries. This, of course, makes us dependent on these developing countries for the food we eat. Once again our foreign policy is affected by our choice to subsidize agribusiness' production of money-losing commodity crops. And once again, the cost of the alternatives to paying the real price for real (organic) food seems like a pretty expensive long-term project.
As you might imagine, there are many more things that could be said. But there are also crops to be raised, and I need to get to that work. No, I'm not objective. But discounting an argument because it comes from someone who believes in the argument is also, in terms of logical analysis, an ad hominem argument!
12. Turkeys for sale
Wendy wanted me to let people know that we have a few frozen turkeys available for sale. Let us know if you are interested (jubileefarm@hotmail.com).
Erick, Wendy and the Crew