Of farms and food

For several months now we've been pondering and reading and pondering about food and farms and air quality and water quality and human health and the climate crisis. We believe key factors can be found in these reports:

• Farming Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis


• Barriers For Farmers & Ranchers to Adopt Regenerative Ag Practices In The US


• Building Bioregional Food Systems Post-COVID 19: The Northeast Healthy Soil Network & the power of regional food system reform consortium work


• Duluth Citizens' Climate Plan: Food and Agriculture Actions

commodity corn: answer or problem?

Photo by J. Harrington

And, because we are a recovering planner, we feel obligated to share the American Planning Association's knowledge base resources on:

• Food Systems

This morning we managed to confirm at least part of the value proposition behind organic food, which is a central element of many of the food system improvements needed:

• Human health implications of organic food and organic agriculture


• Mayo Clinic: Organic foods: Are they safer? More nutritious?

No doubt there are those who will continue to claim organic, local / regional is too expensive and unnecessary in a global economy. There are also a distressing number of anti-vaxxers claiming vaccines are unsafe or unnecessary. Having read, or at least skimmed, the preponderance of the linked material, we believe the current industrial agriculture system is responsible for overproducing at least as much harm as good. It needs to be replaced or transformed into something better suited for maintaining healthy humans and human communities in a healthy environment. There are several legislative proposals at the federal level which help move US in that direction. One example is Representative Chellie Pingree's [D-ME-1] Agriculture Resilience Act [H.R.5861]. (Full disclosure: we haven't read H.R.5861 carefully enough to be sure if it incorporates what we believe is an appropriate level of performance requirements.) There is also Senator Booker's Farm System Reform Act of 2019 [S. 3221 (116th)]. With enough public interest and pressure, food system transformation will not be left like the weather (climate) where everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

 

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

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