| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Alee |
Posted - May 22 2008 : 3:52:37 PM
Solving the Food, Health, & Energy Crisis: Local & Organic Production on Smaller Farms
* Change We Can Stomach
By DAN BARBER
The New York Times, May 11, 2008
Straight to the Source
TARRYTOWN, N.Y. - COOKING, like farming, for all its down-home community spirit, is essentially a solitary craft. But lately it's feeling more like a lonely burden. Finding guilt-free food for our menus - food that's clean, green and humane - is about as easy as securing a housing loan. And we're suddenly paying more - 75 percent more in the last six years - to stock our pantries. Around the world, from Cairo to Port-au-Prince, increases in food prices have governments facing riots born of shortages and hunger. It's enough to make you want to toss in the toque.
But here's the good news: if you're a chef, or an eater who cares about where your food comes from (and there are a lot of you out there), we can have a hand in making food for the future downright delicious.
Farming has the potential to go through the greatest upheaval since the Green Revolution, bringing harvests that are more healthful, sustainable and, yes, even more flavorful. The change is being pushed along by market forces that influence how our farmers farm.
Until now, food production has been controlled by Big Agriculture, with its macho fixation on "average tonnage" and "record harvests." But there's a cost to its breadbasket-to-the-world bragging rights. Like those big Industrial Age factories that once billowed black smoke, American agriculture is mired in a mind-set that relies on capital, chemistry and machines. Food production is dependent on oil, in the form of fertilizers and pesticides, in the distances produce travels from farm to plate and in the energy it takes to process it.
For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have claimed that this is several kinds of madness. But industrial agriculture has simply responded that if we're feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how terrible can our food system be?
Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren't as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer.
In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, it's no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it's grown...
Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/opinion/11barber.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Alee
Farmgirl Sister #8
www.awarmheart.com
Please come visit Nora and me on our new blog:
www.farmgirlalee.blogspot.com |
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