The season is getting chili

Another sign of the changing of the seasons? Today we pick up our penultimate autumn share from the community supported agriculture farm. Here’s what we’ll be collecting:

• BUTTERCUP SQUASH
• FAMOSA CABBAGE
• APPLES
• CARROTS WITH GREENS
• BROCCOLI
• HOT PEPPERS, and
• KALE

The chilly weather today, plus the hot peppers in the CSA box, reminds me we’re entering chili season. [Note to self: speak to Better Half about upcoming menus.] After next week, we’ll be back to relying on local grocers for any fresh vegetables during the winter. There was an interesting article in The Guardian the other day about the need to rely on “mass agriculture.” It both irritated me in its support for large scale agriculture and helped me realize that, once again, the real world answers to many issues isn’t “either / or,” it’s “both /and.” Unfortunately, much of the corporate, capitalistic, global economy persists in creating mega-markets that will only deal with mega-producers, thereby eliminating smaller, local food webs and making all of US vulnerable to price gouging because of oligarchically controlled markets, much like our problems with pharmaceutical giants.

farm size is critical

Photo by J. Harrington

There’s also a significant and growing issue associated with mega-farms and confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs): surface and groundwater pollution that’s imposed additional treatment costs on local water supply systems, both public and private. Instances can be found in Iowa, WIsconsin and Minnesota. I’m unsure of other locations, but The Limits to Growth, 30 Year Update, notes the problem is global in scale:

Resources can be renewable, like agricultural soils, or nonrenew- able, like the world’s oil resources. Both have their limits. The most obvious limit on food production is land. Millions of acres of cultivated land are being degraded by processes such as soil erosion and salinization, while the cultivated area remains roughly constant. Higher yields have compensated somewhat for this loss, but yields cannot be expected to increase indefinitely. Per capita grain production peaked in 1985 and has been trending down slowly ever since. Exponential growth has moved the world from land abundance to land scarcity. Within the last 35 years, the limits, especially of areas with the best soils, have been approached.

Another limit to food production is water. In many countries, both developing and developed, current water use is often not sustain- able. In an increasing number of the world’s watersheds, limits have already been reached. In the U.S. the Midwestern Ogalallah aquifer in Kansas is overdrawn by 12 cubic kilometers each year. Its depletion has so far caused 2.46 million acres of farmland to be taken out of cultivation. In an increasing number of the world’s watersheds, limits have already, indisputably, been exceeded. In some of the poorest and richest economies, per capita water withdrawals are going down because of environmental problems, rising costs, or scarcity.

At the rate we’re going, and have already gone, it probably won’t be long until “big ag” gets sued by as many offended folks with the resources to make it a lasting fight as is currently underway with “big oil.” By the time we’re through, subsistence agriculture may be the only option for the remaining population. That’s also a chilling thought.

Photosynthesis 

Ashley M. Jones 

When I was young, my father taught us
how dirt made way for food,
how to turn over soil so it would hold a seed,
an infant bud, how the dark could nurse it
until it broke its green arms out to touch the sun.
In every backyard we’ve ever had, he made a little garden plot
with room for heirloom tomatoes, corn, carrots, 
peppers: jalapeno, bell, and poblano—
okra, eggplant, lemons, collards, broccoli, pole beans,
watermelon, squash, trees filled with fruit and nuts,
brussels sprouts, herbs: basil, mint, parsley, rosemary—
onions, sweet potatoes, cucumber, cantaloupe, cabbage, 
oranges, swiss chard and peaches,
sunflowers tall and straightbacked as soldiers,
lantana, amaryllis, echinacea, 
pansies and roses and bushes bubbling with hydrangeas. 
Every plant with its purpose.
Flowers to bring worms and wasps. How their work matters here. 

This is the work we have always known,
pulling food and flowers from a pile of earth.
The difference, now: my father is not a slave,
not a sharecropper. This land is his and so is this garden,
so is this work. The difference is that he owns this labor.
The work of his own hands for his own belly, 
for his own children’s bellies. We eat because he works. 

This is the legacy of his grandmother, my great-granny.
Ollie Mae Harris and her untouchable flower garden.
Just like her hats, her flowerbeds sprouted something special,
plants and colors the neighbors could only dream of.
He was young when he learned that this beauty is built on work,
the cows and the factories in their stomachs, 
the fertilizer they spewed out—
the stink that brought such fragrance. What you call waste,
I call power. What you call work I make beautiful again.

In his garden, even problems become energy, beauty—
my father has ended many work days in the backyard, 
worries of the firehouse dropping like grain, my father wrist-deep
in soil. I am convinced the earth speaks back to him 
as he feeds it—it is a conversational labor, gardening.
The seeds tell him what they will be, the soil tells seeds how to grow,
my father speaks sun and water into the earth,
we hear him, each harvest, his heartbeat sweet, like fruit. 

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