Editorial 13.3, March/April 2011. by Deirdre Helfferich Sproinggg! (or, the gardening gear in the works) I love this time of year. Spring has been springing all over the place the last couple of weeks, what with warm sunny weather, dripping gutters, icy roads, seed orders arriving in the mail, intense cabin fever, and—despite all that snow on the ground and the fact that it isn’t even April yet—the conviction that winter’s on the outs. I was born and raised here, so I know better: there’s at least one more good cold spell between now and dirt between my toes. Still, the warmth of the sun is palpable, and it is able (mostly) to keep the house warm. So, I can fool myself into thinking that spring might really be here in more than just the calendar sense. Furry Parts Helping me and my husband along in our post-vernal-equinox frame of mind are the eleven-week-old pair of kittens we recently adopted. These two, George and Lola (the latter known as Alonzo until the vet corrected us), are doing the traditional youthful full-charge gallop around the house in what seems like a constant thunder and thump of (surprisingly loud) furry streaks ricocheting off the walls and furniture—interspersed with occasional naps and snacks and visits to the catbox. Our house is full of astonishing amusements, apparently. The grownup cats, on the other hand, are looking at the baby cats with definite horror on their feline countenances. Not to mention the reproach there every time they look our way. Nothing like a case of the kittens to give you the urge to get out of the house for a little peace and quiet, even if there is still snow and wet all over the ground. The adult feline dignity quotient has been a bit ruffled of late, which serves the self-satisfied twerps right for taking us for granted. I can empathize with them a little, however, especially first thing in the morning when the kittens wake us up by pouncing upon and chomping our toes (those pointy little milk teeth are sharp!). An Agricultural Education I’ve been taking a course this semester at UAF, Comparative Farming & Sustainable Food Systems, and blogging about it at esterrepublic.blogspot.com. The booklist is amazing. I’ve bought everything on it plus a few more I found, with the justification that I can donate it to the library later on. The Ester library is going to have a good-sized section on sustainable food systems, food and health issues, biotechnology, seeds and breeds, the development of civilization, agriculture and climate change, and agricultural philosophy by the time I’m done—and so far none of them duplicate the titles at the Resource Library at Calypso Farm & Ecology Center. Wendell Berry, who recently made the news because he and a bunch of others took over the Kentucky governor’s office in a protest over mountaintop removal coal mining, is the author of one of our required texts, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, first published in 1977. He’s a radical now, and he was a radical then, too. It’s a great read. And then there’s Anna Lappé, who wrote another of our required texts, Diet for A Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It. The course has been enlightening and rather scary (industrial or “conventional” agriculture has tremendous repercussions in finance, epidemiology, climate, social structure, research, even education. More on this will be in forthcoming issues.) We’ve also been discussing organic agriculture and certification, sustainable agriculture (not the same thing!), agroecology, and the idea of appropriate agriculture. The class meets twice a week, and each week has been an eye-opening adventure in the food system and various food and agriculture concepts. Some of them are pretty basic: for example, in the sixth week, Mike Emers of Rosie Creek Farm came in as a guest lecturer to teach us about soil. Essentially, it boiled down to this: soil isn’t dirt. Soil is alive, has a structure, grows, breathes, and—if you don’t treat it well—can die. Aside from my university coursework, the extra light and energy levels in the house lately have gotten me in gear for gardening season a little earlier than normal. I took a Calypso Farm workshop for the very first time this spring, although Hans and I have been members since the CSA’s beginning. The workshop, held at the beginning of March, was on planning a food production garden. Around a dozen adults (plus a few toddlers) spent a few hours figuring out how much garden space they had, what food plants they liked, and how much space they’d need to grow enough to feed their families. It turned out that our garden is about half the size we need, and since I like to grow extra to sell starts at the Ester Community Market, I need more greenhouse space, too. (Hans was, um, less than overjoyed at this news, since he’s the carpenter.) An Agricultural Conference On March 23 and 24, I attended the 7th Annual Sustainable Agriculture Conference. This is the second time I’ve been at the conference—I went last year, too—and it was a blast. I ran into lots of people I haven’t seen in quite a while, and all the talk about farming and gardening and crops and compost made me itch to get outside. The beautiful sunny weather was hard to take in the dark interior of the conference hall—I came out each day envigorated but blinking in the sunlight. The conference draws people from all over the state, and brings up speakers from Outside. This year the preconference workshops were on goats and sheep, and there was a presentation on the new Alaska cheese regulations. Cheesemaking is an up-and-coming industry in Alaska, I suspect. I came away from the conference with a better understanding of biodynamics, a term I had heard before but hadn’t really understood. This was explained in a presentation given by Susan Kerndt, of Wild Rose Farm. Biodynamics, she said, is a term and idea that was somewhat of a precursor to organic farming, and is a sustainable agriculture practice in which one looks at the entire farm as an organism or a unified whole, and which builds the soil of the farm using manure and composting. Another topic that was of interest to me was the panel and presentation on root cellaring. Tim Meyers of Meyers Farm (in Bethel; Tim’s been great at getting publicity for his farm and for the tremendous potential for sustainable farming in Alaska) described the enormous root cellar he built last year, and other panelists (Paul Apfelbeck of Galena, Pete Mayo of Spinach Creek Farm, Michele Hébert of UAF) described how they built theirs and how they functioned. Hans and I used our water house last winter as a root cellar, and it seems to be working fairly well (except for the vole that got into the turnips). Jeff Smeenk, who works for the Cooperative Extension Service and also for the UAF School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, has been doing a lot of potato cultivar research, and brought in potato samples. What was intriguing about many of them was that they were developed by saving potato seed (actual seeds, not so-called “seed potatoes,” which are tubers reserved for planting) and then selecting the plants that had tubers with qualities the researchers were looking for. Potatoes, he explained to me, are genetically quadriploid, and thus can have a boggling amount of genetic diversity in one plant. I saved some potato seedballs last year, with the vague thought that maybe I’d do something with them, but now I plan to have a special seed-grown potato plot in my garden—I’ll keep you posted on the results of my experiments. The other part of this conference that was of great interest to me were the discussions on rhubarb and small fruits. Ruby Hollembeck of Delta, who has been promoting the growth of the rhubarb industry in Alaska, is a hell-bent-for-leather rhubarb evangelist (I suppose that’s a mixed metaphor, but what the hey—you get the idea). She’s created a thorough rhubarb website, www.savor-the-rhubarb.com, and a blog, Rhubarb or Bust (akrhubarb.blogspot.com). I spent some time talking with her and with Danny Barney, one of the Agricultural Research Service’s Germplasm Repository curators at the USDA’s Arctic and Subarctic Plant Gene Bank in Palmer. The gene bank has all kinds of rhubarb, currants (Barney’s specialty), raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, and other interesting edibles (as well as peonies), much of which is grown out in the fields at the Matanuska Experiment Farm. Food Politics There’s a lot of politics associated with food and agriculture, as I’ve been finding out ever since I got involved with the Alaska Food Policy Council last year. There are several initiatives around the state just now that aim to determine just how much food is being produced in the state AND eaten here (difficult to say, really, but it’s not much). We produce a heck of a lot of food—but it mostly goes elsewhere (something like two-thirds of the seafood eaten in the US comes from Alaska waters, for example). We have the potential to produce much more food—listening to Meyers talk about the soil in the Kuskokwim Delta makes a listener want to shout “Hallelujah!” and run out and start a farm—but there are quite a few policy and infrastructure barriers to improving our food security prospects. The state legislature is doing some positive things lately to encourage agriculture, which makes me feel optimistic, if cautiously so. Among them is House Bill 93, sponsored by David Guttenberg, Beth Kertulla, and Scott Kawaski. The bill, “An act relating to school gardens, greenhouses, and farms," provides for funding of school growing programs through matching funds and a small percentage of annual operating support for school districts. It would enable community nonprofits across the state to work with school systems to support teaching, nutrition, and health programs that use school gardens, farms, or greenhouses, similar to the types of cooperative educational efforts that Calypso Farm does. I think this bill is a great idea that would improve children’s nutrition and science education and help local agriculture. I think it also helps lay the groundwork for expanding the agriculture industry in Alaska, and improving our food security. It seems to me a wise use of funds, and I commend the sponsors of this bill. At the federal level, however, it seems to be a different matter (despite Michelle Obama and the USDA’s increased interest in sustainability). A shadow that overhangs the amazing resource that we have here in Alaska because of ARS research and its gene bank is that the only branch of ARS in the state is one of the ten stations that are slated for elimination by the USDA. The irony of this shortsighted supposed money-saver is pretty heavy, given the massive interest that has been shown in this state in the last few years in improving our agricultural industries—and thus our food security. The Agricultural Research Service is responsible for the development of all kinds of cultivars of grains, vegetables, fruits, and flowers that do well in Alaska’s extreme seasons and day length changes. Anne-Corinne Kell of the Alaska Community Agriculture Association, who was also at the conference, described the problem on the ACAA website and succinctly described just what it is that ARS is doing for Alaska and that would therefore be cut:
There’s more about the impact of these cuts at www.alaskacommunityag.org. I think this is an example of really stupid budgeting (I can’t dignify it by calling it planning): whack out the things that save money and even generate economic activity and health in order to gain, maybe, some dubious short-term political leverage (“See? We’re doing something!” Never mind whether the Agricultural Research Service is good for the state, and that cutting it will actually cost us money—it’s the whacking that’s the visible thing, and that superficial appearance of action is what counts.). Earlier in the conference, Danny Consenstein, the director of the Alaska Farm Service Agency, had described just how much of a drain on the Alaska economy it is to have to get most of our food from Outside: We spend approximately $2 billion a year on imported food (roughly 97 to 90 percent of our food requirements, at best guess). That’s a lot of money going out of the state that could be staying here, helping our farmers and our economy. I hope that our US senators go to bat for this program. That room jammed full of entrepreneurial farmers could use their help. Playing in the Dirt Er, snow. So now that you have the context in which I have been operating, you may understand better the crazed gardener mode I’ve gotten into lately. I’ll happily bore you to tears while I talk my head off about seeds and garden beds and minigreenhouses and whatnot. Hans has been clearing a couple of clumps of shade-casting trees near the greenhouse, cutting them up into next year’s firewood and creating sunny spaces where I can plant my overabundance of plant starts (those that survive the kittens, that is). I have big plans for my compost pile (I’m looking for fish heads and guts, folks!) and hope to plant gooseberries, yellow raspberries, and black currants. At the sustainable agriculture conference, Ruby was asking for anybody growing rhubarb to sign up on her producer list, “Even if you only have six plants!” Well, that’s exactly how many I have in my yard, and I’d like to get a couple more, perhaps some of the more exotic varieties they have at the Palmer Plant Gene Bank (I hear there’s a variegated one!). According to the movie Food, Inc., released in 2008, something like 80 percent of the world’s food supply was at that time controlled by just five companies. Since then, there have been many, many mergers and buyouts, and the power over our food supply has concentrated even more. This follows a pattern in many other industries, where immense financial and social power is increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands—corporate ones, where accountability to the public—and to our future—is diluted. Small-scale farming and the local food movements (food democracy, Slow Food, school gardens, farmers’ markets, etc.) are increasingly becoming the means for ordinary people to take control of their lives and health back into their own hands, creating spaces where, through food, they have a pragmatic way to make an individually small—but collectively very important—difference in the direction of the world. In this context, the production of our own food on the individual or family level, of gardening, becomes a revolutionary act. Vive la Révolution! | ||
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