Spring Garden, 2015

Strawberries!

Well, the strawberries are replanted, the raised bed has more soil in it, and there should be plenty of berries by June. Spring is officially here!
I'm feeling pretty good this year, because while I'm not pushing the season, at least I'm not dragging behind it. A couple of weeks back I got the cabbage sets in, planted a small amount of radishes, and then planted broccoli a week or so later. So as of Equinox, there is stuff growing in the garden!

Sure, it's a small bed. But it's growing!

The goal is to grow enough radishes each week to supply the family Monday night dinner salad. As you can see, the cabbage (on the right) has already had a run-in with some slugs. The terracotta saucer has run out of beer and needs replenishing already (and, I suspect, changing over to a deeper plastic saucer).

Yeah, it's been raining again...

The kale (on the left) has done reasonably well over the winter. Of course, it was a drier and warmer winter than usual. The rhubarb (on the right of the bed) recognizes spring--it's doubled in size over the last week. Soon there will be that glorious sour, astringent taste from eating rhubarb. I'll have to save some for mixing with the strawberries in a pie.

Love all the spring green.

I've also started the trellising for the beans and peas. Scarlet Runner beans again (why mess with success), and Oregon Giant snow peas (same reasoning). I'm hoping for an all-time early crop of each this year. Now if we can just get back to those sunny +15ºC of February....

Grease My Palm With Oil

 Via Al Jazeera English

Palm oil. Already a $40 bn/year industry. You can find its derivatives in chocolate, shampoo, toothpaste, detergent, ice cream, floor polish and a host of other products filling supermarket shelves. And, just as you'd expect, that kind of money brings with it capitalism, corruption, and colonialism.
Al Jazeera has produced a series on the effects expanding palm oil production is having in Africa. To quote from the article:

(...) palm oil cultivation does not come cost-free. If not done sustainably, say conservationists, it can have disastrous consequences for people and the environment. In Indonesia, for example, it has played a major role in deforestation which has seen the loss of more than 6 million hectares of primary forest over the last 15 years.
As rainforests are home to least half of this planet's species of plants, animals and insects, the negative impact on global biodiversity can only be imagined. In addition, indigenous communities are also destroyed as people who have lived happily off the forest's resources for generations, often do not own the land (at least not in a form recognised by governments, corporations and their lawyers) and are frequently displaced to make way for new plantations.

There's also the problem that as foreign corporations look to create oil palm plantations, they are finding that indigenous communities have much wider ranges than previously thought or understood, traditional use of territories frequently overlaps between different indigenous groups, and indigenous peoples are often more difficult to buy off or remove than originally thought. Precisely the same issues facing the exploitation of British Columbia's natural resources by multi-national corporations: First Nation's have been here all along, have claim to the land, and aren't really interested in making colonialists richer at their expense.
Having seen the "benefits" of forcing the Inuit off their land and into towns, and the exploitation of resources in the north, this Al Jazeera documentatry looks all too familiar.

The Re-Cycle

From Al Jazeera English

Phosphorus is one of those elements necessary to plant growth, but also seriously abused by modern farmers. Excessive fertilization contaminates runoff, causing algal blooms and killing off lakes and rivers (and, during the Eighties, lead to the deaths of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence river).
Technology, developed in Canada, looks to make us less reliant on mining phosphorus, instead allowing us to recycle it. Amandeep Bhangu, an Al Jazeera reporter in London, UK, visits Europe's first facility that is turning raw sewage into fertiliser.

Why Modern Farmer Rocks...

Because of articles like this. Sarah Baird spotted an old Tex Avery-directed cartoon and decided to have fun with it. My kind of people.....

Externalities

That's what economics calls services that business doesn't pay for. Katherine Paul has an excellent article at Common Dreams called Who should clean up Big Ag's mess?
An excerpt from the opening of the article should suffice to get you over there to read it:

A “Cow Palace” in Washington State threatens public health with its acres of untreated animal waste.
A city in Iowa spends nearly $1 million a year to keep illness-causing nitrates, generated by farm runoff, out of public drinking water.
And who can forget the plight of Toledo, Ohio, residents whose water last summer was so contaminated by farm runoff that they couldn’t even bathe in it, much less drink it?
For decades, America’s chemical-intensive, industrial farming operations have spewed nitrates and other toxic chemicals, animal waste, ammonia, antibiotics, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane gases into public air, waterways and communities.
How do they get away with it? Largely because lobbyists have seen to it that Big Ag is exempt from many of the rules and regulations that other industries, and even municipalities, are required to follow under the Clean Air Act (comments on exemptions here), the Clean Water Act (comments on exemptions here), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the Safe Drinking Act, and others.

Landrace Preservation

Landraces of Andean maize
credit: Karl Zimmerer, Penn State

Science Daily is reporting that what is left of the world's crop diversity is being held by small farmers--that is, farmers who hold between three and seven acres (1-3 hectares) of land.
To quote from the Penn State news release:

What the census shows is that small farmers, in many cases women, are the ones preserving landraces of food crops. A landrace is a locally adapted, traditional variety of a domesticated species. Depending on the crop, farmers may plant anywhere from one to 15 different landraces. While the livelihoods of small land users are often precarious, these landraces provide vital farm and food resources. 

 Small farmers tend to plant different landraces in the same field, encouraging hybridization. Maize, for example, hybridizes quite easily, while potatoes do not. This means a farmer may plant 3 or 4 landraces of maize, but up to 30 or more landraces of potatoes.
But the landraces are not just preserved by farmers in remote rural areas. Frequently they are found also in peri-urban areas--where people live near, and depend upon urban areas--where people are growing local food for local consumption.
The press release alone makes for fascinating reading, and leaves us with some hope for the diversity of foods.

Plus ça Change

...plus c'est la même chose. CBC news is reporting that, while we may think that infant and toddler foods are made to the highest nutritional standards, in fact, they are still being made to shape tastes as the kids grow up. As the article puts it: "The sodium concentration in infant and toddler savory snacks in the latest study was comparable to plain salted potato chips." Are we surprised? We shouldn't be. This first came up back in the 1960s, with exactly the same problems, for exactly the same reasons, and with exactly the same defense.

American Samoa Crosses Their Collective Fingers

Hoping that the next scheduled cargo ship from the US arrives February 2nd. Apparently a dispute between dock workers and their employers at US ports has left Samoa concerned about their food supply.
Radio New Zealand reports:

American Samoa is beginning to feel the effects of shipping delays due to a work slowdown as union negotiations are underway in the United States.
The last food freighter that brought essential food supplies was four weeks ago and most stores have run out of eggs and milk.
Fresh produce is also in short supply driving up the prices of what's available with one store in the Tuala-uta area selling a single tomato for more than $2.
The Manager of the School Lunch Program Christine Fualaau says they have enough supplies for the 18,000 students at the moment but if there's any further delays they will run out.
Ms Fualaau says they bought milk from local suppliers anticipating delays.
She says they have enough to tide them over until the arrival of the next freighter set for February 2.
For produce the school program is using local vegetables and fruits.
The shipping delays have also postponed the start of production at the new Samoa Tuna Processors cannery.

 A similar problem is occurring in Canada's North; CBC is reporting that prices are so high, and the government of Stephen Harper's response has been so ill-thought-out, that they are now trying a boycott of the Northwest Company's grocery stores.

History Lessons

stock image

There was a time, during the late sixties and early seventies, when food hit the top of the agenda in the US. Part of the reason was the politicization of a wide swath of the "Boomer" generation, and part of it was the "inside the beltway" work of Ralph Nader and his crusaders.
The underground press, in conjunction with political bookstores and health food stores, spread the word among the newly politicized public, while Nader's appearances in front of Congress put the word out in the above-ground media. What is appalling is how many of the issues raised then are the issues that are still being raised, as this short excerpt from Harvey Levenstein's Paradox of Plenty shows:

[The three major television networks] repeated charges such as that meat packers relied on the “4D' animals—dead, dying, diseased, and disabled—for processed meats. Realizing that public confidence in all of their products was being shaken, the large meat packers, some of whom owned intrastate packing companies, abandoned their opposition to the bill [to enable the USDA to enforce standards at state-level meat packing plants], enabling it to pass easily.

The quick victory amazed the reformers. Rarely had a bill shot though Congress in less than six months, particularly in the face of stiff opposition in the key committees responsible for it. It showed, some Naderites said, that American politics was not, as current intellectual fashion had it, based on irrational appeals; the public had been given the facts, and its representatives had been forced to respond. Yet in fact the critics soon began to use food issues for quite the opposite reason—their emotional punch. After all, the news that hot dogs contained rat hairs and that breast milk harbored DDT hardly provoked cool reasoning. The activists hoped that a public emotionally aroused by issues such as these would support their wider campaigns to protect the nation's health and welfare from the effects of business greed. Nader was rather rueful about the packers' quick cave-in. They had thereby managed, he said, to put the lid back on the Pandora's box of other issues—chemical adulteration of meat, microbiological contamination, misuse of hormones and antibiotics, pesticide residues, ingredient standards—that would have been useful in rallying the public to his larger crusade to curb corporate abuses.

But the food industries were hardly more successful than Pandora. After confidently announcing to a skeptical audience of newspaper editors in 1968 that food would become the top news story of the coming year, Nader recruited enthusiastic young law and college students to ferret through the food industries' dirty linen—combing the obscure reports of government agencies, analyzing lists of ingredients, asking chemists and biologists about their additives, assembling statistics to document the continuing concentration of economic power in fewer hands. By mid-1969 he was ready with enough evidence to begin the massive assault along the broad food-processing and agribusiness front he relished.

Appearing before the Senate's new Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, he charged that the food industry was dominated by immensely powerful oligopolies who cared only about selling their products, not about their nutritive value. Their “manipulative strategies” bilked the consumer; “the silent violence of their harmful food products” caused “erosion of the bodily processes, shortening of life or sudden death.” Geneticists feared that “the river of chemicals

Modern Farmer

via USDA Photo by by Keith Weller

 Modern Farmer has a great article on the diversity of potatoes and the efforts to expand the number of varieties being grown in the US. It's a great example of what I love about MF; an in-depth article about something not enough people know about, and, in this case, a great partnership. Written by Ferris Jabr, the article notes "This article was reported with support from the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship." So, yay!
But, depressingly, the New York Times is reporting that this wonderful, quirky magazine may by about to disappear. Currently, the magazine part of the operation has suspended after the departure of the magazine’s founder, Ann Marie Gardner, followed by the remainder of the editorial staff. The editorial content has been left to two interns--and they're gone February 1st. 
Sadly, there is a Canadian connection to this story. The Times reports;

At the center of Modern Farmer’s collapse is the magazine’s financial performance. Mr. Giustra, who made money from mining interests, founded Lion’s Gate Entertainment and is a major contributor to the foundation headed by Bill Clinton, had been eager to move into food. He started an Italian olive oil company, invested in both industrial and small-scale farming operations and financed a specialty food company based in San Francisco.

Modern Farmer was part of that portfolio. But after a handful of issues, Mr. Giustra was disappointed in Ms. Gardner’s performance regarding early revenue figures and her ability to deliver additional investors. In the end, the chasm between the two became too wide to bridge and she left.

 Modern Farmer has been a great read. Mr. Giustra has said that the spring edition will be cancelled, but after some new hires, he plans a summer issue. I'll be surprised if he finds writers and editors who can catch that same quirky tone--ranging between global warming and chicken breeds with passion and good humour.