 This Golden Russet variety, good for eating and for cider, is thought to have been grown in the United States before 1845. |
Just a short note to send people to the New York Times article on heirloom apple grower John Kilcherman of Northport, Michigan. It is great to see the Times writing about sustainable agriculture so frequently. This piece was written by Keith Schneider, a former environmental reporting for the Times who is now executive director of the Michigan Land Use Institute.
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A group of idealistic Brits have launched the Guerrilla Gardening movement. Followers skulk around in the dead of night in London to plant flowers, bushes and the occasional corn plant on patches of land that would otherwise remain a deserted eyesore.
Reuters reports that author Richard Reynolds, who literally wrote the book “On Guerrilla Gardening,” says that the movement supports the “illicit cultivation of someone else’s land.” As he explains, “Our main enemies are neglect and scarcity of land.”
It might seem odd that basically law-abiding people have to sneak around to do such good works. But the group recognizes that securing official permission to do anything is tantamount to impossible nowadays in bureaucratic, rule-riddled Western societies.
These anarchistic Londoners are now inspiring similar efforts around the world, including the United States. Breitbart news service reported yesterday on a group of Los Angeles guerrilla gardeners, dressed in orange, pushing supermarket shopping carts with garden tools, who recently descended on an abandoned strip of turf near the freeway under cover of darkness to plant unauthorized, if not downright illegal, bushes and flowers.
While the group has adopted some of the rhetoric of war, they remind me more of the folks in the Sixties who put flowers in the gun barrels of the soldiers arrayed against them. And it is hard to imagine that many adherent will find themselves doing hard time in stir for planting a begonia or two in an otherwise drab patch of land. But, in this era, who knows?
Let’s hope the authorities view this new movement as positively as I suspect we do.
 click here to view the videos |
A week ago, neighbor Dave and I ventured to the the Marriott in Detroit to video people from around the country who are doing amazing things with sustainable foods systems. In one video, Tristan Reader and Karen Blaine talk about their community’s efforts to reduce obesity and diabetes among Native American youth. They work with the Tohono O’odham people on projects that promote growing and preparing traditional foods. The tribe lives on more than 2.8 million acres outside Tucson.
“In 1960, no tribal member had ever had diabetes, and today, over 70% of adults over 35 have Type II diabetes. Kids as young as four and five years old are being diagnosed with it,” says Reader. Part of their approach is to bring back traditional foodstuffs such as the tepary bean. Reader said that a few years ago, they had difficulty buying a 100-pound bag of this staple, but last year they raised 70,000 pounds of the beans on their own farm.
In New York City, Rev. DeVanie Jackson and her husband, Rev. Robert Jackson, from the Brooklyn Rescue Mission, have succeeded in opening a new Farmers Market, a bright spot in the urban food desert of their Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The mission is already feeding 4,000 people a day, and now they have a new market that will offer produce from their urban farm. (Christina Grace of the New York State Department of Agriculture and Deputy Commissioner Kevin Jeffrey of NYC’s Department of Parks and Recreation talk about how they helped to cut red tape to make this happen.)
The trio from Nuestros Raicas (”Our Roots”) in Holyoke, Massachusetts, now have a petting zoo, in addition to their community garden. Young people who have run afoul of the system work in the garden, a win-win strategy for all involved.
In the spirit of full disclosure, the C. S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems hired us to shoot and edit the videos, as part of their work with the Kellogg Foundation’s Food & Fitness Initiative. But rest assured that this was not why I was so impressed with what these communities are doing.
On another personal note, I am taking an early retirement from Michigan State University as of today. MSU has been my welcoming home since 1986. My first nine years were spent working with the late Dr. Robert Trojanowicz on efforts to reduce crime and violence, as Associate Director of the National Center for Community Policing at the School of Criminal Justice. I came to the School of Journalism in 1995, becoming coordinator of the Victims and the Media Program and adding instruction in media criticism and digital journalism.
As of tomorrow, I will prepare to start cashing my Social Security checks. The good news is that I have enough money to live on the rest of my life — provided I die by Friday. So I will be working to make my new publication - Sustainable Farmer - a success. And I will be consulting with groups involved in saving the world through sustainable practices. My goal is to become even busier in retirement, focusing all my energies on the issues I really care about.
Lou Dobbs calls for President Bush’s impeachment over the salmonella outbreak in tomatoes, probably because the tragedy fits with his xenophobic world view that the Food & Drug Administration is not pushing hard enough to establish a Mexican connection.
Meanwhile, new cases have appeared in the last 10 days in Tennessee and New Jersey. The tally so far is one person dead and more than 200 sick.
As a result, tomato growers are also suffering. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the price for a 25-pound box tomatoes has plummeted from $17 to $7, and consumer confidence is still in freefall.
Salon’s “Explainer” provides a comprehensive look at the various ways that salmonella can end up in our tomatoes. The bacteria starts in the intestines of animals, including humans. Then there are numerous ways that the bug can travel from animals into our food, some of which raise questions about industrial ag and our food safety inspections.
 Vine-ripened tomatoes are less likely to have problems because it is less likely their skins are pierced in shipment, and small holes can allow the salmonella in |
Yes, the outbreak could be the result of farmworkers relieving themselves in the fields, as Dobbs appears to suspect. It could also be caused by wild animals carrying feces on their feet as they run through fields. The New York Times recently ran an article on feral swine, created when domestic swine escape and breed with wild Russian boars. While European diners love this organic pork, the growing population of feral swine in many states threatens to spread disease into crops when these animals burrow through.
Salmonella can live in the gut of animals that don’t show signs of disease, and such diseases can spread more easily in confinement operations. Runoff from those livestock operations is another possible route into our vegetables.
With so many potential sources of contamination, the fact that the Food and Drug Administration only has enough funding to inspect vegetable growers once a year is scandalous. As Salon’s Explainer explains, in comparison, the USDA conducts daily inspections at meat-packing plants - yet we know that problems in that industry still persist. It seems no surprise that FDA barely knows where to start looking this time.
The answer for many is to buy tomatoes from local growers they trust or grow their own - or to forgo tomatoes altogether. How sad to think of a summer where people are afraid of eating a red, ripe tomato.
Sustainable farming practices that emphasize good management, including keeping livestock contained so they cannot become feral, is an essential key to restoring confidence in the system. Perhaps the only good news in this salmonella case is that it reminds us of the importance of developing sustainable systems that people can trust.
The upside-down tomato planter experiment seems to be going well so far. As you can see, the little guys are reaching for the sun. The Super Fantastic tomato seems to be going sideways, while the Beefmaster is trying hard to crawl up the side of its gizmo.
The challenge is finding the right balance with watering. At one point, the relentless thunderstorms seemed to be producing a greenish mold on the canvas of one planter. Yet once the storms stopped, if you did’t fill the watering bowls on top of each unit every day, the soil soon got a bit too dry. And remember that I added the moisture-release beads that help the soil hold and release moisture slowly, so if you use plain potting soil, you will probably have to water morning and night.
I now wish that I had been able to plant my upside-down tomatoes at the same time I started tomatoes in my Burpee Aqua-Shields (which I still prefer to call wall-of-waters). I would have liked to be able to compare their relative progress. However, the wall-of-waters went in on April 20, but delays in shipping the upside-down tomato planters meant they were not planted until more than a month later - on May 24.
The wall-of-water tomatoes are therefore much further ahead. Comparing varieties, the Super Fantastic really lives up to its name. It’s the biggest plant by far, and it already has two decent-size green tomatoes. The Beefmaster is not far behind, with the Yellow tomato not far behind that. It is the Healthy Kick tomato that looks sickly. It enjoys the same feeding regimen as the other varieties (fish emulsion fertilizer once ever three weeks with a little top-dressed kelp every month after the first feeding for the tomatoes in the wall-of-waters). But the little guy looks puny, has yellowy leaves and only has one tiny green tomato. Maybe it’s the tomatoes that give you a healthy kick, not the plants?
Check in periodically for more updates. Now comes the long wait for the first ripe tomato of the season.
Yahoo Buzz has collected links to lists of resources available online for home gardeners and others who want to grow vegetables. Click on the Growing Tomatoes link, for example, and you see a list of links ranked by their relative usefulness. Then it’s on to Growing Strawberries or Growing Sweet Potatoes.
 Solitaire seed from Johnny’s |
The Japanese sure love sweet melons. A few weeks ago, a pair of Yubari cantaloupe sold for $23,500. Now a black Densuke watermelon has sold for $6,100, purchased by a man who says he wants to support local agriculture.
These boutique melons are packaged like an exotic liqueur, suspended in a rope lattice inside a fancy box. The black watermelon is grown only in northernmost Hokkaido province. The Yahoo article notes that these rare melons normally sell for $183 to $283. Japan is noted for having high-priced gourmet products, such as Waygu beef from Kobe that regularly costs $500 a pound in Japan. (According to the MSNBC article, Waygu beef sells for as much as $53 a pound here.)
But could local farmers here have a little fun and make a little money by offering rare vegetable and fruit varieties?
One problem, of course, is finding a source for either Densuke or Yubari seeds. And even if they were available, they may not grow well here. But in addition to the sweet Black Diamond watermelon seeds that at least sound familiar, Johnny’s Seeds sells seeds for black-skinned Solitaire watermelons for $35 for 50 seeds. Now that’s a pretty exotic price. Frugal as I am, however, even I would pop $10 to taste one of these melons if a local grower offered them here. An enterprising grower who laminated the article about the $6,100 watermelon as a display might well be able to charge a stiff premium. And it would be fair to tell customers that this variety is as close as we can get in this country.
Maybe I will order a packet of seeds myself - a bargain at $7.35. I really do want to know what a Solitaire tastes like.
Bloomberg is reporting that United Nations Secretary Ban Ki-Moon is calling for a 50% increase in food output by 2030. Food shortages have now caused rioting in more than 30 countries worldwide, and some leaders at the three-day U.N. conference in Rome argued that diverting land into ethanol risks creating further economic instability worldwide. A staggering one-third of the U.S. corn crop will go toward ethanol production this year, up from 23% a year ago.
On a positive note, higher food prices here are fueling a resurgence in urban gardening. This article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette talks about the economics of starting an urban gardening project. With a budget of $20,000, Hillcrest Farm is able to hire 10 local students at $7.20 an hour to help with the project over the summer.
I am old enough to remember the waning days of the 
Liberty Gardens in the 1940s. The new Liberty Garden movement reminds us that 44% of the food we ate during World War II was raised in home gardens. I believe we still have enough of that can-do spirit to do this again. However, too many articles fail to note the challenges, such as ensuring the soil is safe and protecting unattended gardens from youthful vandalism. The solution to the latter lies in building community and giving young people a stake in the initiatives by finding ways to raise the money to pay them to help, as Hillcrest does.
I often think of my old friend Larry Green, once a fellow reporter and now publisher for the Pioneer Press in Illinois. Back in the mid-Seventies after the end of the Viet Nam War, he said that the two big stories of the next decade would be energy and agriculture. Certainly looks like history is repeating itself. Maybe this time, we won’t forget the lessons we learned back then.
