Monday Multistory

Issues with urban agriculture are going to come increasingly to the fore as conditions worsen and people struggle to maintain their food supply through some very dark times. Over at AgWeek, they're running a story about some of the problems UA is facing in one neighbourhood:

NEW BRIGHTON, Minn. — From the front, nothing about the house in suburban New Brighton appears that different.
 A car sits in the driveway near a flower bed of towering magenta amaranth
 plants. A small pirate flag waves from atop a picnic table, a nod to
the “Peter Pan”-inspired name the women who live here gave the half-acre
 property when they moved in seven years ago.
Behind the one-story house, however, is a different scene.
There, you see sprawling vegetable gardens, berry plants, bee hives and lots
of fowl. A large coop extends from the back deck and houses about 15
laying hens, a dozen quail, a few heritage turkeys, a couple ducks and
one Serama rooster. A basket brimming with vegetables sits on a table
near a garden bed. Next to it is a bowl full of multicolored eggs.
The collection represents a day’s harvest at “Lost Boys Acre,” an
experimental urban farm operated by four women in the quiet residential
neighborhood near Silver Lake Road and Interstate 694.

Let's be frank; a half-acre property isn't all that big, and that is a lot of fowl. New Brighton doesn't have any bylaws regarding urban agriculture practices, so everything the four women are doing at Lost Boys Acre is legit.  But that's a lot of noise for a suburban neighbourhood....
The rest of the article makes it pretty clear that much of what's going on is a simple neighbours dispute (the primary complainants really don't like the four women in the house for reasons that have nothing to do with urban ag), but conflicts like this are going to become more and more frequent. Now, I don't actually expect municipal governments to get in front of this issue (cough Havana cough), but they really should be noticing this on their radar and setting some rules.
this is also aan opportunity to set some rules on acceptable treatment of livestock: cattle not allowed on areas less than two acres, say, or chickens needing so many square metres of space for roaming about. The setting of such limits will be subject to abuse (of course), but once in place can be changed by subsequent administrations. these kinds of bylaws can also provide some guidelines for the ethical treatment of livestock in more rural areas.

Which leads to a story from back where I used to farm; Alberta. The CTV news programme W5 ran some undercover footage of an egg operation about 20 km away from our family farm. The story is typical--120,000 birds in battery housing, dead birds not removed from cages, horrific environment, etc.

Down a quiet road, deep in Alberta farm country, not far from Edmonton, is a massive egg production facility known as Kuku Farms. Housing about 120,000 battery hens, they live out their lives in cramped cages, producing almost an egg a day for a year until they are considered spent and killed.

The video shows row upon row of hens crammed into battery-cages. Nearby are dead birds that appeared to have been there for some of time, birds with missing neck feathers and some with severe urine scalding on their backsides.
A few kilometers away is another barn, Creekside Grove Farms. In this barn about 100,000 chicks spend the first 20 weeks of their lives crammed 50 to a cage, standing on barren wire. These are chicks that will eventually become egg-layers.
The undercover video shows some chicks injured while others clamber over them for access to food and water.
Other chicks can be seen escaping from the crowded cages to end up on the hopper, where they are covered in feces and sometimes mangled by the machinery. Perhaps most disturbingly, sick or injured chicks are seen being killed by a practice called "thumping" -- where a bird is smashed against a hard surface to kill it. On several occasions the video shows birds that survived but are left in a garbage bag along with a pile of already dead chicks

Nobody can defend this-- but heaven knows, someone will.  Egg producers are policed by their own group--who are primarily concerned with whether producers are following the quota rules, rather than the proper treatment of animals. However:

On Monday, Egg Farmers of Canada released the following statement from its chairman, Peter Clarke:
"As a fifth-generation egg farmer and chair of our industry, I have visited hundreds of Canada's more than 1,000 egg farms. I have never seen hens treated in the manner shown. I share in the public's response to the video. The images were unacceptable. However, I object to any perception that this is in any way common, tolerated or representative. It simply is not.

Actually, I don't buy that. After a trip to the University of Alberta experimental farm a few years back, it was clear that standards were developed with producers, not the chicken's, requirements in mind. And the problems with factory farming of chicken  are myriad; from arsenic in the meat to issues of manure disposal. But as reported:

W5 found that the industry group tends to focus more on whether eggs are safe for consumption and whether the farmer has the right number of chickens allotted under the industry's market quota system rather than on the well-being of the animals laying the eggs.
The Mercy for Animals investigator told the program that when she was undercover at Creekside Grove, workers were given 24 hours' advance notice of an inspection and that the facility passed inspection.

Until this is top-of-mind for consumers, Egg Farmers of Canada won't give a damn about how the animals are treated. Only when it impacts the bottom line will it matter.

Over at the Guardian, they have a lovely graphic about how much food is wasted from farm-to-fork. The figures were put out by Tesco, a major food retailer, and funnily enough, they show that 16% of food is wasted or destroyed on the farm and by consumers, but less than 1% is wasted by food retailers. Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on this. The EU reports:

Food waste in industrialized countries is as high as in developing countries:

• In developing countries, over 40% of food losses happen after harvest and during processing;
• In industrialised countries, over 40% occurs at retail and consumer level.

 (emphasis mine).

East Coast vs West Coast

I've recently finished a couple of urban farming memoirs: Novella Carpenter's Farm City: the education of an urban farmer and My Empire of Dirt : how one man turned his big city backyard into a farm : a cautionary tale by Manny Howard. Both were interesting to read, but both were really American in their assumptions. Novella Carpenter wrote her book from Oakland, CA, while Manny Howard was writing his from Brooklyn, and the bi-coastal divide is really apparent in their approaches, their style, and their outcomes. Manny, like Julie Powell of Julie and Julia fame, takes on a project that becomes obsessive and relationship-destroying. We meet him suffering a moment in his life that I remember well, the moment when you look around at the reality of being married and having young children. You suddenly realize that it's not all about you, and you are a grown-up now, even if you don't feel like it, want it, or believe it. Its disorienting at best, and in our modern consumer-oriented, atomized culture, distressing. We've created a culture that is best served when we remain self-obsessed adolescents for our entire lives, where “growing up” is seen as the end of the best times rather than a transition into a richer time. In Manny Howard's case, there is a serendipitous phone call from an editor: “How about you turn your yard into an urban farm and live off it for a month?” I can only assume that there was large amounts of alcohol available at that story meeting..... Manny is trapped in that space between adolescent invulnerability and adult sense, and so agrees. His expenses will be covered and there's a nice chunk of change at the end of it all. It is, for anyone who's ever thought about turning their yard into a farm, a perfect situation. You do the work, and someone else pays the bills. Manny bulls ahead, clearing out his backyard, installing a French drain system, and trucking in a load of good topsoil. His aspirations quickly spiral out of control, as he plans a garden, ducks, chickens, and rabbits. His approach is best described when he notes that “this cage, like the rest, was built on the driveway with no plans.” He's never gardened, let alone farmed, and there's no time to do the research up front, so go, go, go! His wife, a long-suffering, highly paid executive at a New York publishing firm (yes, a chauffeured town car picks her up and drops her off daily), watches her husband descend into a madness of obsession and manure, where his definition of the perfect world is radically different from her own. And he appears committed to taking the two children with him into this nightmare. Ultimately, Manny doesn't do a good job of living for a month from the work of his hands. Its not all his fault—there is, after all, a tornado that touches down on his street. And his forays into home meat production are ill-considered at best. All of which stand in stark contrast to the joyous madness happening in Oakland. Novella and her partner Bill move into GhostTown, a neighbourhood in Oakland that is barely functional, where there are shootings blocks away, where the best you can say is that it has become a Temporary Autonomous Zone. Bill, Novella's partner, refits vehicles to burn bio-diesel made from recycled vegetable oil. She works miscellaneous temp or part-time jobs, and comes from a pair of 70s back-to-the-landers. Suffice it to say, Novella is not without clue. Not that she makes it easy on herself. GhostTown is a tough place to live—almost unimaginable for a Canadian working class kid like myself. But when she spies the seemingly abandoned lot next door, Novella hatches a plan. Like the Diggers of England, and the Diggers of San Francisco, she sees that ownership and use must go together. So she begins to clear an abandoned city lot in order to build a garden. And right from the get-go, people start showing up to help. This would be Reader's Digest stuff, except for the strong whiff of counter-culture and the lack of respect for property rights. So, more Utne Reader then.... Novella's book is filled with people who are not her. The people she talks with about how to kill a pig, the drunks and druggies, her neighbours. In each case she tries to give the reader an impression of who this person is, to help make the same connection to them that she felt. The farm is central, but the real story in Farm City is the web of relationships that develop in the temporary Autonomous Zone. Novella gains self-definition when she meets Willow, the woman who drives the area's food security program by farming vacant space and refers to herself as an “urban farmer.” It is a label that Novella quickly adopts (and with good reason). Novella builds gardens,and then decides to indulge in the gateway drug of the urban agriculture movement: chickens. Or, in this case, chickens, turkeys, and ducks. Chickens really are a gateway drug. They add something alive to the landscape—whether urban or rural—and by the time they are ready to lay eggs, you're already addicted to watching alien-yet-understandable activities. And the first time you steal eggs from a nest, you know you're never going back again. I've a farming background, even though I was brought up in the city, so I have always known about the linkage between raising an animal and having to kill one. But killing an animal, any animal, is one of the rituals of humanity from which we have become abstracted. Death is something we shelter ourselves from, hide away, and by doing so, make more powerful. Death is the act that separates the gardener from the farmer. Death is the hurdle that has to be cleared. Both Manny Howard and Novella Carpenter manage it, but Novella manages it with grace and understanding. The two books reflect their authors, but also the places they are written about. Manny Howard's is intense and neurotic—much like the Greater New York area seems to be. Novella Carpenter's book is sprawling and inviting, a masterful combination of memoir and research. Perhaps my being more of a West Coaster than an East Coaster affects my response to the two books. Or maybe being a hippie at heart and a back-to-the-lander myself defines my response. But I'd rather read about Novella's successes rather than Manny's meltdown.

Urban Farmers

 A lovely project from Fire and Light Media Group: a series of short (and long) videos introducing you to urban farmers.




The trailer (above) is longer than many of the short films, but is a real delight; so many people passionate about growing food! The urban farming movement is really taking off--particularly with the experience of Cuba to draw on.

Photo from the City Farmer website

This is a shot of an urban farm in Havana--a farm a lot bigger than pretty much every urban farm in North America. But what has been done in Cuba can be translated into cities here in Canada. In Victoria we have a under-used program that puts growers together with people who would like to see their gardens be used. There are a number of community gardens--like the one up at the University of Victoria that Paula and I are involved with. There's also the Greater Victoria Compost Education Centre, a great resource for converting waste into soil. We had them come out to the Rainbow Kitchen (old site) and do a compost education day last fall. And Lifecycles, who worked on a fruit harvesting program (among so many other projects) last fall that filled a 20cf freezer with sliced, cored apples at the Rainbow Kitchen. Apples picked from the huge number of urban apple trees in this city.
We forget that urban farming can also grow livestock. And not just chickens, but rabbits (my aunt supplemented her income and the family's food  with a rabbit hutch on the family garden plot back in Manitoba decades ago), or pigeons (we forget that pigeons are edible, domesticated, and have been considered suitable for kings as well as commoners). There is a tremendous potential for integrating food production into our lives in the city. It is really a shame we don't do it more often.