Historical perspective article on how US is developing sustainability 'standards' on Truth About Trade & Technology blog site.
Jim Prevor, editor of Produce Business magazine, writes extensively and debates the definitions/expactations in his Perishable Pundit blog/columns on the topic in reference to the produce wholesale/retail industry too.
Need to fit the small/medium grower perspective into these discussions.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Sustainable Food Lab -- one way to define 'sustainability' -- make up your own.
When Wal-Mart makes an alliance with the World Wildlife Fund, as stated on the Sustainable Food Lab website, is it because they actually are trying to save the planet, or because they want potential customers to think they are really rewarding their suppliers for trying to protect the environment? Just asking...
Sustainable = Organic ...there they go again!
The headline is Farm tours demonstrate sustainability in agricultural production systems.
I guess if it said Farm tours demonstrate potentially sustainable agricultural production systems it just wouldn't sound as enticing.
The farms highlighted on the tour are sustainable because they've found profitable niche markets and are operated by savvy entrepreneurs who happen to produce organically, not because organic production systems are sustainable in and of themselves. Can the Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association say for sure that every one of their member farms is sustainable, or just that they are producing organically? Oh yeah, I forgot that they equate the two.
The event does sound like a great opportunity to learn about Ohio agriculture and enjoy fresh, local, organically-grown foods. Just don't feel guilty about the carbon-offset lost by driving to visit the farm.
I guess if it said Farm tours demonstrate potentially sustainable agricultural production systems it just wouldn't sound as enticing.
The farms highlighted on the tour are sustainable because they've found profitable niche markets and are operated by savvy entrepreneurs who happen to produce organically, not because organic production systems are sustainable in and of themselves. Can the Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association say for sure that every one of their member farms is sustainable, or just that they are producing organically? Oh yeah, I forgot that they equate the two.
The event does sound like a great opportunity to learn about Ohio agriculture and enjoy fresh, local, organically-grown foods. Just don't feel guilty about the carbon-offset lost by driving to visit the farm.
Trying times...
"These are the times that try mens' souls..." and the weather is not much help either!
The forecast for the week predicts a few more days of possible scattered severe thunderstorms across southern NJ. One just passed through, dropping a half to 2 inches of heavy rain in less than an hour. There's the possibility that hail dropped along this strong front as it went by, but haven't received word yet. We're sitting on thousands of acres of spring greens and herbs ready to harvest and young summer crops just transplanted or emerging. Hail can wreak havoc at this stage of the game making crops at harvest stage unmarketable, and outright killing younger plants. It's too late to replant most of those summer crops at this stage. The heavy rains can flood fields leading to crop losses too.
A farm's sustainability can easily be put in peril by a severe summer storm like this. A profitable or break-even season can be turned into big losses. No income means bills and loans don't get paid. Next season, lenders hesitate to back the operation. In less than an hour, a successful season can literally be washed away.
The forecast for the week predicts a few more days of possible scattered severe thunderstorms across southern NJ. One just passed through, dropping a half to 2 inches of heavy rain in less than an hour. There's the possibility that hail dropped along this strong front as it went by, but haven't received word yet. We're sitting on thousands of acres of spring greens and herbs ready to harvest and young summer crops just transplanted or emerging. Hail can wreak havoc at this stage of the game making crops at harvest stage unmarketable, and outright killing younger plants. It's too late to replant most of those summer crops at this stage. The heavy rains can flood fields leading to crop losses too.
A farm's sustainability can easily be put in peril by a severe summer storm like this. A profitable or break-even season can be turned into big losses. No income means bills and loans don't get paid. Next season, lenders hesitate to back the operation. In less than an hour, a successful season can literally be washed away.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Facts from the Farm started as a weekly segment highlighting New Jersey agriculture for listeners of Ed Hitzel's Table for One radio show heard across southern NJ every Saturday morning. It is an attempt to give foodies a glimpse into where their food comes from and some of the challenges of getting it from farm to fork. While I figure out how to archive some of the twelve years worth of spots and maybe set up the current one as a podcast, this is the transcript from this past week.
---
Facts from the Farm for June 6, 2009
Bear with me Ed -- I hope you don't mind if I rant a little this morning. You see, all our spring crops are ready for market and being shipped daily. Johnnie Formisano raises about 300 acres of fresh vegetables and herbs in Landisville. Yesterday, he told me sales are steady, but prices are nothing to set the world on fire.
My gripe is with food retailers, food service distributors, and gullible consumers. The food industry is perceiving demand for all that is green and sustainable. Seeing that organic foods bring in only a small number of consumers, and their claims of having the best food safety certification system is negated by the fact that they're all the same, how will they attract new customers?
By claiming they are sustainable and that they only buy from growers or suppliers using sustainable practices.
Of course, there's still great debate about what practices are sustainable, but Johnnie will tell you that he's invested many thousands of dollars to reduce soil erosion, block the wind from blowing his topsoil away, employs integrated pest management to reduce his pesiticide use at Formisano Farms. Now his buyers are demanding that he document all his 'sustainable' practices before they will buy his produce.
And when they do, will they add a few cents to every package to help offset those investments? Don't bet on it!
If consumers want their stores to stock foods from sustainable farms, the first order of business sustainability is a positive bottom line! [You can't become green if you're always in the red!]
That's today's Facts from the Farm.
---
Formisano Farms has been highlighted in What's in Season from the Garden State, Rutgers' NJ Farm Fresh website, in numerous newspaper articles and in cookbooks such as Starting with Ingredients (page 407) by Chef Aliza Green. Starting it all off was an interview by cookbook author and columnist James Beard who dubbed Ralph Senior the 'Fennel King of South Jersey'. Brothers John Sr. and Ralph Jr., along with John Jr., are maintaining the throne into the fourth generation.
---
Facts from the Farm for June 6, 2009
Bear with me Ed -- I hope you don't mind if I rant a little this morning. You see, all our spring crops are ready for market and being shipped daily. Johnnie Formisano raises about 300 acres of fresh vegetables and herbs in Landisville. Yesterday, he told me sales are steady, but prices are nothing to set the world on fire.
My gripe is with food retailers, food service distributors, and gullible consumers. The food industry is perceiving demand for all that is green and sustainable. Seeing that organic foods bring in only a small number of consumers, and their claims of having the best food safety certification system is negated by the fact that they're all the same, how will they attract new customers?
By claiming they are sustainable and that they only buy from growers or suppliers using sustainable practices.
Of course, there's still great debate about what practices are sustainable, but Johnnie will tell you that he's invested many thousands of dollars to reduce soil erosion, block the wind from blowing his topsoil away, employs integrated pest management to reduce his pesiticide use at Formisano Farms. Now his buyers are demanding that he document all his 'sustainable' practices before they will buy his produce.
And when they do, will they add a few cents to every package to help offset those investments? Don't bet on it!
If consumers want their stores to stock foods from sustainable farms, the first order of business sustainability is a positive bottom line! [You can't become green if you're always in the red!]
That's today's Facts from the Farm.
---
Formisano Farms has been highlighted in What's in Season from the Garden State, Rutgers' NJ Farm Fresh website, in numerous newspaper articles and in cookbooks such as Starting with Ingredients (page 407) by Chef Aliza Green. Starting it all off was an interview by cookbook author and columnist James Beard who dubbed Ralph Senior the 'Fennel King of South Jersey'. Brothers John Sr. and Ralph Jr., along with John Jr., are maintaining the throne into the fourth generation.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Sustainability discussions in the dark
This is the second time in a week I've seen an article discussing the foci of sustainable ag in the wrong order. It seems for many folks sustainable ag still means organic, while others want to use sustainability as a marketing tool (way more on that later!) and promote the environmental components first and foremost in selling to gullible consumers.
Today's Rodale Institute newsletter contains a review of Farming in the Dark by Rhonda Janke, a former research director at Rodale, now an associate professor at Kansas State University. Her specialties are actually very similar to mine -- soil and water quality, medicinal herbs and alternative crops sustainable cropping systems. Her book, though based on interviews of a small and admittedly unrepresentative sample of "even sustainable farmers", supposedly reveals why sustainability is not emerging "as a parallel movement to a large, centralized, corporate system." She asks why sustainable ag hasn't solved the problem of farmers needing to take day jobs to pay the bills, obtain health insurance and support the family while farming into the night, and then finds a group of "speakers who are able to eloquently capture and debate the attitudes within the movement".
That's where our interests diverge. First, it's not hard to support a conclusion if you hand-pick your sample. It's not good science, but that's what happens when you try to support a movement. All of the agricultural enterprises equated with sustainability - direct marketing, niche/value-added marketing, specialty crops and "all the latest innovations" - are not in and of themselves sustainable. They are products and processes that innovative farmers can use to create economically viable farm businesses (note that none of them address the environmental constraints of sustainability, mostly the economic and in a small way the social). Those that use them successfully, as in all businesses, succeed and sustain their livelihoods AND their families. Those without the entrepreneurial skills to grow and sell products, in whatever form, do not survive.
Sustaining any small business takes work. Sustaining agricultural businesses takes a lot of work, hard and long hours, well before sunrise and long into the night. Yes, in the dark!
Today's Rodale Institute newsletter contains a review of Farming in the Dark by Rhonda Janke, a former research director at Rodale, now an associate professor at Kansas State University. Her specialties are actually very similar to mine -- soil and water quality, medicinal herbs and alternative crops sustainable cropping systems. Her book, though based on interviews of a small and admittedly unrepresentative sample of "even sustainable farmers", supposedly reveals why sustainability is not emerging "as a parallel movement to a large, centralized, corporate system." She asks why sustainable ag hasn't solved the problem of farmers needing to take day jobs to pay the bills, obtain health insurance and support the family while farming into the night, and then finds a group of "speakers who are able to eloquently capture and debate the attitudes within the movement".
That's where our interests diverge. First, it's not hard to support a conclusion if you hand-pick your sample. It's not good science, but that's what happens when you try to support a movement. All of the agricultural enterprises equated with sustainability - direct marketing, niche/value-added marketing, specialty crops and "all the latest innovations" - are not in and of themselves sustainable. They are products and processes that innovative farmers can use to create economically viable farm businesses (note that none of them address the environmental constraints of sustainability, mostly the economic and in a small way the social). Those that use them successfully, as in all businesses, succeed and sustain their livelihoods AND their families. Those without the entrepreneurial skills to grow and sell products, in whatever form, do not survive.
Sustaining any small business takes work. Sustaining agricultural businesses takes a lot of work, hard and long hours, well before sunrise and long into the night. Yes, in the dark!
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