But it’s important to remember that industrial-scale farming (with or without GMOs) has been around for only a few short decades; before that, everyone ate what they—or their local farmers—grew for them. And today, in small places all over the country, this sort of farming—small, local, often organic, and decidedly not GMO—is once again beginning to sprout. On small farms in the country, in the suburbs, even in run-down sections of industrial cities, small farmers—responding to a growing unease with industrial food production—are beginning to connect with the people they feed. In the process, consumers are not only paying more attention to their food, but paying more attention to their farmers and to their land.
Outside the City
Drew Norman is entirely sick of hearing that GMOs are the future of food. Sure, he knows that by the end of the century, the world may well have to accommodate an additional 2 billion people, many of them in the developing world. He knows we will need to grow more food, on less land, in the most efficient way possible. So, are genetically engineered foods the answer?
“Fuck that,” Norman told me.
A lanky, graying man in a seed cap and leather boots, Norman is no dewy-eyed environmentalist. He is an avid deer hunter, with trophy heads mounted on his wall. He has few positive things to say about government regulators and considers local environmental groups to be obnoxious to farmers. His son is scaling up the family hog farming business from eight animals to several hundred.
But Norman is also the owner of One Straw Farm, one of the largest organic vegetable farms in Maryland. Norman started farming thirty years ago and has been running his farm as a community-supported agriculture (CSA) operation since 1998. Working a 65-acre vegetable farm, plus another 150 acres of forest and hayfields, he and his wife, Joan, now supply food to some 10,000 people a week, through their 1,900 CSA members and by delivering to a half-dozen Maryland farmers’ markets. In his barn, the day I visited, there were stacks of crates filled with squash, tomatoes, and kale. Four large trucks were preparing to deliver to thirty-eight pickup CSA sites around the state, including some right in the heart of Baltimore.
Margins are small for any farmer, and Norman has had to be nimble. His team has been selling canned tomatoes and peppers for years; they are now doing Bloody Mary mix and are about to market a tomatillo salsa. His son is planning to raise two hundred hogs that will feed on acorns in the farm’s oak forest. Chickens may be next.
Norman’s counteroffer to corporate, monoculture, GM farming is simple: Buy local. When you buy a cabbage from your local (and preferably organic) farmer, you don’t have to worry about whether it’s been “tested,” because the food was grown the way food has always been grown (or had always been grown, before petrochemicals and genetic technology entered the equation): with seed, soil, sun, and rain. You also don’t have to worry about whether part of the cost of the cabbage is going to pay the salaries of seed company executives in an office building in St. Louis, or a political lobbyist in Washington, or a pesticide company in Wilmington. Your money goes to the farmer.
If there were more farms like his—and until just a few decades ago, there were—none of us would need to eat engineered food, Norman says. His food, organic and local as it is, is also cheap. I pay him $500 every winter for six months of produce in the spring, summer, and fall—which works out to about $20 a week for a large canvas bag stuffed with everything from lettuce, spinach, and collards to acorn squash, sweet potatoes, and watermelon. This is routinely more than my family of four can eat.
Norman runs a farm that is a model of sustainability. He intercrops (strawberries with oats, for example) to prevent erosion. He plants cover crops. He has enormous windrows of compost. His feelings about raising meat mirror his feelings about farming generally.
“There was an equal number of buffalo when we got here as there are cattle today,” Norman told me. “They were eating and doing their thing and providing meat in a pretty environmentally friendly way. If we planted our corn into grass and raised cattle on it, we’d probably have the most environmentally friendly way to produce protein there is.”
In Europe, where small farms like Norman’s have been the model for hundreds of years, opposition to GM crops has been intense since the beginning. Although typically framed as an issue of food safety, Europe’s anti-GMO argument is also fundamentally built on anxiety—or outright anger—over the effect of large-scale farming on small-scale farmers. Italy, France, Spain—they have all spent centuries stitching together small-scale farm economies and take well-earned national pride in the quality and integrity of the food these farms produce.
But given that by the end of the century less than 10 percent of the world’s population will be living in Europe, is a European-style, small-scale agricultural model something the rest of the world can afford to emulate?
Drew Norman, and many others, think the answer is unequivocally yes. Not only would the food this system creates be healthier, it would support local economies and curb the power of global food conglomerates. Regardless of whether GM foods are “dangerous,” they are definitely corporate, aggressive, and—in every sense of the word—monopolizing. They so dominate the agricultural, political, and cultural landscape that consumers—here and abroad—can’t opt out even if they want to.
To Norman, the heart of the issue is trust. “If something is being tested by the people making money from it, I don’t trust the tests,” he said. “If there’s no government oversight or independent testing on the safety of a product, I don’t trust the company—who’s going to make millions or billions—to be honest.”
But can farmers like Drew Norman really feed all of us? Especially given our current eating habits—more bags of chicken nuggets than bundles of organic kale—does the world even want what Drew Norman is growing? Local, organic food, to many people, seems like a yuppie indulgence: boutique, expensive, and—in the end—a lot less satisfying than a burger, some fries, and a Coke. And if this is true in the wealthy United States, isn’t it also true in the developing world, where companies are hard at work pushing their GM corn and soy?
“Look,” Norman said. “The Third World can’t afford to buy Stouffer’s meals. The Third World needs to use local ingredients and cook in their own kitchens. A local food system is a really easy thing to do in the Third World. That’s what they’ve always done, and that’s what they’re doing right now. Kenya is number three in the world in certified organic farms. They are pretty food sufficient, and they’ve done that by supporting local food systems and local agriculture.”
As for American consumers, who claim they “have no time” to cook their own food—let alone think about how (or where) it is grown: “Quite frankly, by the time you drive to McDonald’s and buy your burger and fries, you could have made your meal at home,” Norman told me. “Americans are so busy chasing an income to be two-percenters or whatever it is, they don’t have time to look around at the environment or their health. All they have to do is look in the mirror, but they’re so busy doing what they’re doing they don’t have time to do even this.”
I asked Norman about national trends in obesity, diabetes, and all the other ills associated with GMO-driven fast food and processed food, and the next-gen GM products that promise to deliver these same foods with less fat, salt, and sugar. “It all goes back to money,” Norman said. “The likely solution is the stupid solution. GMO potato chips? That’s not the solution. The solution is to eat more fruits and veggies, not the thousand-calorie coffee drink. That’s where I just think Americans don’t look at what they’re doing.”
We have to question a food system that puts way more energy into food production than we’re getting out of it in food calories, Norman said. Conventional farms can use 10 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food—and this is before calculating the energy it costs to ship food around the country and the world. Food grown in the South and Midwest travels an average of 1,500 m
iles from farm to plate.
With the exception of some feather meal he buys from nearby chicken farmers, Norman grows all his own fertilizer through the use of compost and nitrogen-fixing cover crops. A head of lettuce grown with petrochemicals and shipped from an industrial farm in California to Baltimore, in other words, is a far more polluting (and far less efficient) vegetable than lettuce grown with no chemical inputs and shipped twenty miles from Norman’s farm.
“Scientists reduce everything to its simplest forms, but they are not looking at the big picture,” Norman told me. “You can do a lot in the laboratory, but it needs to be rounded out by people looking at the big picture, and talking to each other. If the world looked at the problems associated with industrial agriculture as a whole, they would realize the food is not inexpensive. We need ethicists and ecologists to be a part of this conversation. We have to stop looking at everything as only coming down to the bottom line.”
In the Country
Three hundred miles to the north, among the rolling hills and dairy farms of New York’s Hudson River Valley, Steffen Schneider is doing everything he can to return farming to its rightful place as the center of community life. Schneider, like Drew Norman, thinks that GMOs are merely a symptom of the invisibility of food production.
“I always come to the conclusion that GMOs are an answer to the wrong question,” Schneider told me. “They always say, ‘We have to feed the whole world,’ but that’s not the right way to approach it. Clearly, there is already enough food to feed more people than are alive right now, so that’s not the right question. In my mind you would have to look back and reflect on agriculture’s role as humans in relation to food and to the planet. When you have a compass and you’re trying to figure out the way to go, you don’t find out by taking the compass apart and breaking it down to its atomic structure. That’s not going to get it.”
Schneider works 400 acres at Hawthorne Valley Farm, ten miles west of the Hudson River about two hours north of Manhattan. His farm includes 15 acres for vegetables and 40 acres for grain. He grazes sixty dairy cows and thirty beef cattle, and he keeps as many as forty hogs. Schneider runs Hawthorne Valley as a “biodynamic” operation, following principles put forward by the Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner. Long before the modern organic farming movement, biodynamic farmers paid scrupulous attention to the intertwined ecological health of their entire agricultural system, from soil and weather to plants and livestock. Synthetic chemicals are anathema, as is the kind of mistreatment of animals that has become such a grim trademark of industrial-scale feed and slaughter operations.
“There needs to be an inner shift—that’s been my recognition these last few years,” Schneider told me. “People are looking and searching. A big part of our customer base here is mothers and young people worried about feeding their families. Hopefully, over time, we will make these changes. Otherwise, we’re just going to stay stuck. What are our responsibilities? Everybody has to ask this of themselves. There is an amazing opportunity to ground this change in agriculture.”
Schneider got a degree in agronomy in Germany before coming to the United States in 1983 (he worked a dairy farm in Wisconsin for seven years before moving to Hawthorne Valley). Following Steiner’s biodynamic ideas, he imports nothing to the farm except tractor fuel and electricity: his fallow fields are protected and enhanced with cover crops like rye, vetch, and red clover; he grows his own hay and produces all his own fertilizer from compost and animal manure. From April until late fall, his cows are in pasture, and his pigs are fed whey during the cheese-making season, food scraps from the Hawthorne Valley grocery store and deli, leftovers from his own sauerkraut, and milk by-products. The closest meat processor is just twenty miles away.
For Schneider, a farm should be the centerpiece of a local economy, not a cog in the global economic machine. His fields are part of Hawthorne Valley’s larger vision for “social renewal” that includes—right next door, in the same beatific valley—not only a sizable farm store but also a K–12 Waldorf school, a Place-Based Learning Center, and a Farmscape Ecology Program. Schneider’s farm provides work for eighty people on the farm itself, and two hundred if you include the store and the school. “It’s a great thing to be able to offer meaningful work to so many people,” Schneider said.
Farmers and teachers work closely with families throughout the region to connect them with their food as well as their bioregion. Living and eating near Hawthorne Valley, it would be impossible not to know where your food came from, who grew it, or under what conditions. It would also be impossible not to understand the relationship of the farm to the larger landscape.
“However you define ‘sacred,’ essentially it’s a place you love,” Conrad Vispo told me. Vispo, a PhD wildlife ecologist, and his wife, Claudia, a PhD botanist, run Hawthorne Valley’s Farmscape Ecology Program, an education center committed to documenting the human and natural history of the region’s farms and wild landscapes. Teaching farmers, and children, and everyone else about the ways food production fits into a larger ecological context is a sure way to bring people closer to their food—and to open their hearts to the places they live, Vispo told me.
“Why do you love a place? Your experiences as a people, your individual experiences—you make your judgments based on facts, but also on your core feelings on what is right and wrong,” Vispo said. “What we hope to do with our program here is make the land sacred to more people, in the sense of getting more people to love the land. Then the way they think of the land will include more than just how to use the land. It will include how the land will be affected by their actions.”
In other words, Hawthorne Valley is as far from an abstracted monoculture industrial farm as it can be. The food, and the farm, and the people—they are all intimately connected. And intimacy, Steffen Schneider said, is the best way to ensure that both people and land will be properly cared for.
“In any country, the first thing they have to ask is, ‘What do we have to do to develop farming systems that are successful right here?’” Schneider said. “The Green Revolution did a lot of good, but it was also extremely destructive because it destroyed a lot of traditional farming systems. Most people in the world are still eating local food, but these companies are saying this traditional way of farming and eating is not ‘modern.’ This is not helpful.”
No matter where a farmer is working the land—in New York, in Maryland, or in Kenya—“we need to figure out what local adaption means right there,” Schneider said. “We are one human community. We have to look at all of us as one human community. There will still be crops that we share—coffee and chocolate won’t happen unless we bring them in. But we need to feed our own communities. We have to envision things radically different. We can’t just do it slightly better. Then maybe this whole GMO discussion might just go away.”
Hawthorne Valley functions as a nonprofit, but its business model is still highly sensitive (and responsive) to market demands. The farm produced New York State’s first organic yogurt, and now that educated foodies have gone in big for fermented foods, Schneider is producing eight different varieties of sauerkraut. The day I visited, Schneider took me down to the kraut cellar, where workers were producing kimchi from Napa cabbage using a “vicious” homemade hot sauce.
The market to which Schneider has to respond ranges from people in his own rural community to five different farmers’ markets in Manhattan. He sells raw milk to locals (state law prevents him from selling it off-site) and sends trucks two hours to Manhattan every Thursday to feed 250 families who are members of his CSA. His organic yogurt makes it all the way to markets in Maryland. In the winter, his greenhouse—heated by radiant hot water piped beneath the soil—produces salad mix and microgreens, both of which collect high prices in the Manhattan markets. “It’s amazing what this stuff commands in NYC,” Schneider said. “It’s not like any of us are getting rich off this, so I don’t feel bad about
it.”
Schneider is thinking about expanding his operation to a “full-plate” CSA, with bread and cheese and meat. For years, the farm did not raise chickens because the birds require “inputs” of feed, but now that Schneider is growing grain, he may add them. Again, it’s all about balance.
“There would be lines in New York City for our eggs,” he said. “People also want us to grow more veggies. We could, but then we would need more animals, and it might throw the whole balance out of whack.”
Handling the pressure to grow is a mixed blessing for Schneider: if it’s forcing him to recalculate the balance more production would require, it’s also confirmation that his style of farming is catching hold. He is constantly being asked for advice by young farmers, who see his integrated, even philosophical approach to farming as a far more exciting prospect than growing endless acres of GM soybeans. To the new generation of farmers, Schneider’s approach offers more than a job—it engages their imagination.
“With industrial agriculture, people practicing farming are looked at as having no social standing,” Schneider said. “Farmers have become cogs in this industrial system. They aren’t happy about it, but they don’t feel that they have a choice. We’ve forced them to produce as much corn and soybeans as cheaply as possible, and they just do it, because they’re stuck. Entire communities have been wiped out in the service of industrial monoculture. What’s going to happen in twenty years? Agriculture can offer so much by reinventing economic principles, and our relationship with the natural world, and with each other. It’s a very exciting time for me to be in agriculture right now.”
Food Fight Page 24
