Local Agriculture, Terrorism, and the Red State

An excellent op-ed by Jennifer Wilkins, a 'food and society fellow' at Cornell, in the NYTimes today about the homeland security benefits of a better local food supply:

The combination of cheap food from overseas and the consolidation of domestic production compromises America's ability to feed itself. A food system in which control of the critical elements is concentrated in few hands can and will fall victim to terrorism or accidents.

The solution to these insecurities is to establish community-based food systems that include many small farmers and a diversity of products. Such systems make large-scale contamination impossible, even for determined bioterrorists. Far more people have contact with the Mexican lettuce at the supermarket, for example, than with the locally grown lettuce at the farmers' market.

But is it possible for farmers' markets to feed a growing country and provide the range of produce we demand? The answer is yes.

The op-ed only talks about security concerns, since Tommy Thompson brought up our current food system's vulnerability to terrorism. But a system of local farming has many other benefits as well. Local food by definition does not travel as far from the farm to the table: nutrients and flavor have less time to degrade, and less energy is used to transport and store the food. Small-scale local food production builds community and provides jobs. Eliot Coleman, organic farmer extraordinaire, says 5 acres of farmland can be enough to make a living as a market gardener, provided you manage it well. And growing your own food, in backyard plots, on roof decks, in vacant lots, is possible even for die-hard urbanites. Last night my family ate salad that included a particularly cold-hardy variety of arugula that I've been growing in what used to be a weedy room-sized patch between my building and the next.

Ms. Wilkins complains that all kinds of federal policies discourage small-scale local farmers and that policy would need to change. Then, hysterically, she suggests that "the change in the cabinet, at both the department of health and human services and the department of agriculture, is an opportune moment for a such a change in policy."

If you, unlike Ms. Wilkins, don't feel like waiting for hell to freeze over, learn more about all this stuff from some of the resources below. But I'd like to make one more point about why it should matter, especially to dems who realize that we need a so-called rural strategy to make headway not just in the red states, but in the red parts of the blue states, and in the purple states. Agrarian reform must be an important feature of any such strategy. Our agricultural system is overwhelmingly corporate, and improving opportunities for small-scale farming in areas without much employment opportunity would mean that some people could go back to jobs with dignity (farming) rather than work at the wal-mart for lack of anything better to do. There are plenty of wise people already out there doing agrarian reform stuff, they just need the people in the blue pockets to reach out and say 'yeah, we'll buy your food.'

Resources

On growing your own, for snotty urban liberals, see the mother of all urban agriculture sites, www.cityfarmer.org.

On growing your own, for snotty urban liberals who have moved to rambling farmhouses with a little more land than 'none', see this interesting article about part-time farming and The New Farm.

For buying local, learn about community supported agriculture at the USDA's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education site. SARE also has a bunch of other useful stuff, so poke around.

A 'new agrarian' reading list.

And for everyone, a book that combines personal history with suburban farming with starting a community garden with history and explanations of how we ended up with our current dysfunctional food system, This Organic Life, by Joan Dye Gussow.