Paper for my Food Politics Class

Mark Boyd
HWP 373
Amy Lanou
August 28th 2008


How Can We Save Our Seeds?
The threat of the GM and Hybrid Monoculture


Next time you're walking around campus and pass someone you know, I urge you to stop and ask them this question: "Where does your food come from?" If they answer "the supermarket," flick them on the forehead and be on your way. If they answer "farms," give them 10 points and a pat on the back. But if they answer "seeds," shake their hand vigorously and tell them they are a true gentle-person and scholar.

How can we so easily forget something so elemental? What happened in these last two generations that led us so far from the genesis of our food? What divorced us from the miracle of the lettuce seed, as small as this comma, though in fact a living (even breathing!) child waiting to be born? Anyone who has grown a plant from seed must at some point scratch their head and say, "How'd it do that?" The intuitive alchemy this intelligent mote of life orchestrates with so little help from us is dumbfounding - if only child-rearing were so easy!

So what happened to our mothering relationship with the Seed? When did we leave them at the bus stop to be whisked away by the yellow combine of industrial agriculture? How and when did six companies gain control of 98% of the total food and flower seed produced in the world? (Kingsolver 51) And why did we wave goodbye so happily?

Perhaps it's that growing food can be hard work. For what amounts to a blip in human history, a vast majority of people in America now do not grow their own food, and they don't even know how. History tells us that sometime, long ago, we discovered bronze, and that metal elevated us out of the Agricultural Age. How does this make sense? Although we've stopped casting bronze shields and swords, even iron and steel ones, we've never stopped growing food. We've passed through the Industrial Age, even the Post-Modern and Post-Post-Modern Age, but each spring, someone still must plough the field, plant the seed, and pay attention to it.

Growing food is hard work, and elevating one's self from subsistence farming has long been seen as the first step up from extreme poverty. But at what cost? What kind of intelligence, what kind of biodiversity do we lose as more and more people continually leave their farms for the city, leave their farms in the hands of million-acre agribusinessmen whose only concern is their yield?

Would you leave your children with a rapist? Would you leave your seeds to someone who has no respect for the land? This is the hidden crisis, looming as large as global warming, but it's still under the radar, and could very well remain there until it's far too late.

Diversity is the key to plant success in nature. Too many of one cultivar invites opportunistic disease and pestilence. The decline of home-gardener, and small-farmer seed saving and the rise of industrial agriculture brought the number of available non-hybrid vegetable seeds down from 5,000 in 1981 to 600 in 1998 (52). What is perhaps more disturbing is that "Agribusinessmen can patent plant varieties for the purpose of removing them from production" (52). First of all, where did we get the idea that seeds are as much our creation as lightbulbs? Secondly, how can someone make growing a food plant illegal? This is what unbridled capitalism creates: laws that suit its own purpose, people in power that perpetuate them, and a world without a longview. As the geneticist Jack Harlan wrote, "These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine.... The line between abundance and disaster is getting thinner and thinner" (52). Life is not a commodity, to be bought and sold - it is something that, though resilient, must be cared for, and cannot be so easily squeezed onto the assembly line.

Humans cannot replicate the innate intelligence of nature in the laboratory, and although genetically modified crops might prove to be safe for human consumption, how can we tell until it is too late if they are safe for the world? There are simply too many contingencies to consider, too many possibilities for things to go wrong. GM technology exists only because we've been doing things the wrong way. We're fixing a problem that wouldn't exist if we simply went about growing and distributing food a different way. Leaving our seed supply in the hands of so few (and those whose goal is to make money, not food) is foolish and threat to the survival of the human race. The only way we can undo the damage done is to preserve the long-cultivated heirloom varieties by supporting farms who grow them, or planting them in our own backyards (53).

I made an indoor grow system for under $40 dollars!

New Plants, Container Gardening, and the UNCA Garden Crew

I just finished creating and seeding 9 or 10 self-watering recycled plant containers.  They're sitting now, outside, wrapped in plastic bags to maintain their temperature.  I built two and a half flats with reused and dumpstered wood that hold the seedlings out off the porch and in the sunlight.  I'll post pictures soon but I don't know where a working camera is at the moment.  I seeded Black Simpson lettuce, Cherry Belle radishes, Evergreen Bunching onions, Arugula, French Breakfast radishes, and Early Top beets, and a few others.  The goal is to have these outside year-round, and hopefully the plastic bags will keep in enough heat at night for now.  Eventually, I want to build a cold frame over them, but it definitely ain't winter yet.

I also want to turn my house into a jungle of container plants--some rare, some small trees, some flowers.  Coffee plants produce a pound of coffee beans a year after 3-4 years growing from seed.  I also want to grow more herbs for homemade teas.  I've been looking into LED grow lights--the 14W arrays have a comparable output to a silver halide lamp, but last for 10-15 years, operate extremely cool, and are 100% recyclable.

The garden at Amanthus's and Zac's is doing well--we planted and trellised Royal Blue beans, squash, a few late peppers, and left more room for seedlings coming up.  Once again, the seedlings shot up in only 2 days, most of them already developing vigorous roots and shoots.  A new bed is in the works now that Zac is back from learning how to make better sourdough in San Francisco for two weeks.  The mosquitos in the back are a menace when working at sundown, but we're working on some herbal remedies for them.

The UNCA garden crew is an idea that came to me for a new club to start when I go back to school this fall for Environmental Science with a concentration in Ecology.  It looks like I'll be going for another four years, but that's OK--I've finally found what I really love to do and learn about.  The garden crew would be a collection of people who are interested in gardening, self-sufficiency, and recycling.  Here are some of the ideas I've come up with: 

-Raised bed gardens
--School-wide thermophilic composting (in this way you can compost meat, dairy, and even human waste). We can also compost newspaper and paper waste from offices and students around the school.
--Weekly or monthly newspaper/zine outlining current and future projects, also featuring articles on local and organic food and techniques for growing.
--Free seedlings in recycled containers to give away to students, emphasizing plants that can be grown in dorms and windowsills.
--Rainwater catchment systems
--Garden dinners where fresh food from the school garden and local farms entices people to come to hear local farmers or experts in their field talk about their practices.
--Edible landscape featuring placards that educate passers-by on when to pick the fruit/greens, as another means of passively showing people the difference between fresh local food and the flaccid produce you'd buy in a grocery store.

I've already got the support of at least two faculty members as well as two incoming freshmen students.  About 30 people have joined the group on Facebook and hopefully that many people (or more) will come to our first meeting!

Alrighty, just wanted to give you guys a bit of an update.  School starts the 19th!

I'm gonna sleep now...zzz....

<3>

The Greenhouse!

So shortly after my first post, I went to visit Imladris Farm.  I had a tough time getting there and probably drove 70 miles that day (it's supposed to be a 20-30 mile trip).  Walter was kind enough to walk me through his set up--but not before we both got a big glass of ice water.  Outside his house is a kind of apple tree that is more tart and smaller than a Granny Smith--I forget if he told me what kind it was.  I got to see his 100 year-old rabbit barn and shiitake growing operation.  He also showed me the land that he had been clearing for the last 2-3 years, with the help of the goats who eat a majority of the weeds there.  He seems to be doing very well for himself, and offered a lot of advice on managing soil organically.

One thing that had never occurred to me before that we talked about concerned the collapsing colonies of honeybees across America.  What he told me was that the honeybee is not a native insect--that it was imported from Europe not only for the honey but to assist in crop pollination.  Now, at this point in agriculture (or agribusiness), we have become as dependent on the honeybee for our food as we have become dependent on the fossil fuels we need to ship it.  Instead of relying on the native pollinators (of which there are hundreds, if not thousands, including birds, native bees and wasps, even flies), we spray our crops to kill with insecticides that kill every other living thing except the honeybee.  But nature has its way, if not always swiftly, of correcting our blunders.  Walter used to keep bees to pollinate his raspberry, blackberry, and blueberry bushes, but they only did so when everything else in the area had already been pollinated.  Honeybees don't prefer them, so what he had to do was literally flood the entire area with them.  Yet one time, after releasing his bees that were not more than 10 feet away from his patches, the bees flew straight up about 30 feet then took off in a completely different direction, to pollinate something far away.  After that, he decided that it wasn't necessary, cost-effective, or just plain sensible to keep them.

So what do these rising instances of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) mean to our food source?  It means we'll have to either A) push forward, keep breeding honeybees, flood our farmlands with them, possibly genetically alter them or B) use more sustainable farm practices.

While that one sinks in, here's another thought that raised my eyebrows: it's from The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.  He says in the beginning of the book that, before synthetic fertilizer (read: ammonium nitrate + hydrogen extracted from natural gas, or less commonly, coal), the human race was, at the brink of the new century, running into a problem of mass starvation.  The problem is that, though nitrogen is one of the most abundant elements in the atmosphere, you need either lightning or legumes to "fix" it into the soil, that is, break their tight bonds with one another and become bio-available.  Before synthetic fertilizers, no one in their right mind would plant corn year after year on the same plot of land--it just wouldn't be possible.  Thus, there was a theoretical limit of how much food could be grown for the number of people alive, and the human population would have leveled off, through starvation, resource wars, etc.  A large part of why China opened its doors to America in the 1970s was so they could have access to more ammonium nitrate--their people would have starved without it.

Here's the frightening thing that I don't hear many people in the news talking about: the fertilizers that feed the world at its current capacity are manufactured with natural gas.  Natural gas is a finite resource, and as with all fossil fuels, many project that within our lifetimes, the EROEI (Energy Return Over Energy Invested) will plummet to the point where it won't make sense to get it out of harder, and harder to reach places, especially because natural gas is more difficult to transport.  This means that even before oil runs out we could be facing a massive, world-wide starvation.  "More than half of the world's supply of usable nitrogen is now man-made....Vaclav Smil, a geographer...estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention." (Omnivore's Dilemma--note: Fritz Haber was the scientist who discovered the process of making synthetic fertilizer.  He was also the scientist who created chlorine gas and Zyklon B.)

I won't beleaguer that point, and I think you guys can fill in the rest.

Anywho, on the bright (and more local, practical side), Amanthus, Zac, and I cleaned out the greenhouse attached to their new house, got some soil mix, and planted 264 plants last night around midnight.  The list is:

Russian Red Kale

True Siberian Kale

Butternut Winter Squash

Royal Blue Beans

Dill

Parsley

Chia

Chives

Nigella (flower)

...and maybe a few more I'm forgetting--I know I'm forgetting one kind of flower, but yeah, anyway above are the pictures.

Signing off, with mush love,

markus

I'm goan be a FARMER

So this is my blog documenting my gardening/farming/landscaping exploits.  Right now I'm too lazy to explain to everyone why I'm not going back to school next year, and all the reasons I'd rather become a farmer, but you'd better believe it's got something to do with fossil fuels.  What doesn't these days?  We're either consuming them or actively not trying to consume them--not trying to, but usually not doing so well at that either.  Let's all stop and take a moment to appreciate the long trail of pollution and trash we all just left behind us today--whether it's through plastic wrapping, exhaust, use of electricity, paper, eating food from the supermarket, or simply buying anything at all.  Needless to say, this upsets me--I feel hypocritical, I feel wasteful, and I feel like I could be doing much better.  That's why I'm reorienting myself.  I'm trying to transform from a consumer to a producer.  How am I going to do this?  By growing food and planting beautiful flowers.

Featured are some pictures of a very meager beginnings of a backyard garden.  The plants we have are tomatoes, basil, carrots (if they ever poke their heads up), chia (yes, chia), thyme, kale, spinach, sunflowers, beets, and strawberries.  The cinderblocks are the beginnings of a raised bed (which now has the second layer of blocks on top).  Although they might not be as pretty as wood, raised beds made with cinderblocks are more weatherproof and strong, as well as rearrangeable.  In the holes we'll plant perennial herbs as well as some "deterrent" flowers like marigolds (good for keeping rabbits and deer away) and some helpful flowers that attract bees and spiders and mayflies and wasps, all which kill the icky bugs that eat all the good stuff.

Tomorrow, I'm going to visit the Imladris Family Farm where I'll be working part time weeding and harvesting the blueberry, raspberry, and blackberry patches.  Imladris is a 4th generation family farm, making primarily jams, apple butters, raising rabbit for their poopy compost (it has a neutral pH and decomposes well) as well as for eatin', and, believe it or not, shiitake mushrooms.  From what I hear, Walter actually makes most of his money from the shiitake operation he has by powdering them into a mix that, when added to sour cream, is so delicious that wars have been fought over it or something.  It's almost twenty miles away but it shouldn't be too hard getting there on my scooter.  Hopefully I'll get some nice pictures while I'm there so you can see what it's like too.

I've also seemed to have fallen into a dream job, that is, a part-time landscaping gig for my neighbor which involves a ton of weeding and eventually bed-building and planting of flowers,

 herbs, and possibly dwarf fruit trees.  You might not be able to see from the pictures of our yard, but we don't get too much sun back there and I want to maximize the space we have for growing food, not necessarily flowers.  But in this yard I'll be able to do just that, while learning a bunch about gardening in and out.  Hopefully, if they allow me, I'll be able to post some "progress" pictures with that project too.

Oh, yeah, and I quit my job at Earth Fare (an all-natural grocery store where I've been working for the past 9-10 months).  I am working out my last two weeks as a cookie/scone/biscuit/muffin baker, and hopefully getting a part-time job elsewhere at a restaurant called O'Naturals where I'll be baking fresh bread for sandwiches.  My interview is on Saturday, so wish me luck!  Seems like they'll pay more and I get a free meal every day.  The store opens up in July.

I ordered a bunch of gardening tools 'n' books:

Tools:

-Soil blockers

-Grow lights for seedlings

-Carpenter's square

-Handsaw

-Crescent wrench

-Level

-pH/Moisture tester

Books:

-Mini Farming for Self-Sufficiency (using raised beds to pump out the crop on 1/4 of an acre, enough to feed 3 family members)

-Country Wisdom & Know How (how-to of everything self-sufficient)

-The Garden Primer (the gardener's Bible)

-The Good Life (a chronicle of a couple in the Depression-era carving out a self-sufficient, totally vegan life in Vermont)

-Fruits and Berries for the Home Garden (the how-to on growin' the good stuff in your backyard)

-Grafting Fruit Trees (a little book/pamphlet that's hopefully informative)

Anywho, we're about to watch a movie, so I guess I'll go, but I just wanted to let you guys know what was goin' on in Asheville.

Much love,

Mark

FUN FACT: my brother Sebastian named his new kitten "Orange Fazeezy"