Nice piece on the 100 mile diet ... myth!

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2320323

farming as a social cause

Does farming become sustainable just because you ignore the economics? Farming is attracting renewed interest among non-farm entrepreneurs. The motivation may be respectable, but you still need to make a profit to feed yourself along with those you wish to 'help'.

City farming becomes a social cause

Sustainable Ag Standards -- who is setting them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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!

[Fwd: [Fwd: Re: AFBF Sust Ag Article]]

----- Original Message --------

Subject:	Re: AFBF Sust Ag Article
Resent-Date:	Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:45:03 -0400 (EDT)
Date:	Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:44:55 -0400
From:	Jack Rabin

When the USDA Sustainable Ag program began, people argued for years how to define it, before finally giving up. SA means different things to different people, with their own private agendas, which have little to do with farming sustainably.

Clearly, for domestic US agriculture, among real farms and farmers, the primary POLICY driver for sustainability was, is, and will always remain, Economic first, Environment, and Social goals 2nd and 3rd. I don’t think it was an accident the USDA Farm Bill of 1985 wrote the 3 components of sustainability in that order. They were listening to farmers and looking at empirical evidence of US history.


There is ample empirical support to show that without profits and prosperity, without Net Farm Income, a farmer, and a nation, can’t improve environmental protection.

• Minimum or No-Till taking “steel in the field” is herbicide dependent. That’s capital.
• That’s chemical research and manufacturing. More capital. (Rodger said a new Turb-0-Till is $60K+!)
  
• Reduced flow low pressure drip irrigation takes capital.
  
• Solar powered pump stations take capital.

Historically, the empirical evidence for US agriculture is that “indebtedness” has always been the foremost problem for sustainability. Max Pfeffer at Cornell (used to be Rutgers) has documented this.

It dates from the Prairie Populists after the Civil War and continued through the farm crisis of 1979-1985. Moreover, when farms are unprofitable, or have property rights problems, resources get abused. This empirical observation is worldwide, from the abused collective soils and farm resources of the former Soviet Republics to poaching of resources in poverty stricken Africa and Asia. Poor people, without private property rights protected by government, poach and abuse resources like trees, soil, etc. There is no conservation without markets and without pricing.

Look at this another way: Sustainability is really a GOAL a business enterprise shoots for, not a practice. Being sustainable means the farming system is DURABLE enough to withstand the famous FIVE RESOURCE RISKS to agriculture while INDEFINITELY using resources meeting human needs without depleting them:

1. Production Risk (weather, soils, hail, drought, pests, diseases, erosion depletion, drought depletion, etc.)
2. Economic/Financial Risk (interest rates, credit access, debt load, banking stability, impermanence syndrome from rising land costs, input costs rising faster than product sales = cost-price-squeeze, etc.)
3. Market Risk (loss of markets, inaccessible markets or dependency on external railroads/trucking, international price competition, monopoly power abuse, buyer consolidation, food value of the dollar, etc.)
4. Human Resource Risk (management depth and skill, family labor, hired labor, infirmity, death, etc.)
5. Legal Risk (government policies, coercion, local land use conflcts, takings, regulatory environment, illegal coercion from armies, environmentalists, terrorists, etc.)

The NRCS is “colored” by its successful history in the 1930-1950s of dramatically successfully reducing production risks. When the NRCS USDA’s Dr. Lowdermilk wrote his powerful “Conquest of the Land through 7,000 Years,” it shaped the world view for generations in that agency. And Lowdermilk was correct regarding soil and water. Without stewardship of soils and water, nations are impoverished and fall, losing their political freedoms and their very existence. But, that is ONE among the 5 risks toward the goal farming sustainably.

I think what that South Dakota farmer author was arguing [Farmers, it’s time to take back ‘sustainable’ by Troy Hadrick (p.2)] is that a farming system needs to durably withstand all 5 risks to be sustainable. Not one. Five. Any farm with a debt to equity ratio of > 0.6 is usually doomed to fail because it cannot durably withstand risks. That’s real empirical ag banking data, not newspaper Op-Eds.

So, in that sense, the agricultural sustainability definition debate has been hijacked by non-farmers. It has been hijacked by neo-Malthusians. It has been hijacked by anti-science, anti-technology advocates and special interests. It has been hijacked by a whole host of people and groups with lots of agendas. Mostly, like the Luddites of 18th century England, these people lament the tragedy to farm families. The tragedies happen continuously in all sectors of the economy. It is due to “economic dislocation caused by technological innovation.” Economic dislocation is painfully tragic to farmers’, to workers’, to investors’ wellbeing and livelihoods.

But “economic dislocation” occurs because it better serves consumers with lower cost goods. The revaluation and/or abandonment of outmoded producing economic assets are part of the cleansing vibrancy of a market system.

So, in reality, all these advocates, including farmers, who hijacked the agricultural sustainability agenda are really frustrated at the economic dislocation from technological innovation in our society. They mistakenly pick on farming efficiency. They pick on factory farms. They pick on large farms. Like Luddites, or Shakers, or any other group, they mistakenly believe technology itself, not their failure to manage capital to adopt it, to adapt to it, is the problem.

Yes, the debate has been hijacked.

Real sustainability advocates recognize farmers can usually deal with about 2 Risks simultaneously. In the 1979-1985 farm crisis, farmers had 1) rising interest rates and inflation, 2) loss of export markets from disastrous policies, and 3) rising energy input costs with falling product output revenues, which resulted in falling Midwest farmland prices where they owed on mortgages more than the equity value of the land [sound familiar in today’s consumer real estate banking/credit crisis?].

FARMERS WERE DEALING WITH 3 RISKS AT ONCE, and they were overwhelmed. Notice that all these sustainability problems dealt with financial economic risk.
This event gave rise to the USDA L.I.S.A. [Low Input Sustainable Ag] which became the Sustainable Ag program. This was its policy origin. Not resource conservation. Not soil. Not water. Not organic. Not anti-industrial. The chemical/organic/fertilizer issue came in simply as a way for farmers to reduce purchasing petro-chemical inputs whose price was rising faster than their sales revenues.

Anyway, that farmer is right. The interesting thing is that all farmers do care about these resources, pragmatically, as they affect the bottom line (sustainability). The frustration farmers feel is that their needs are pragmatic, daily, and these hijacked policy debates go on in Washington, or in newspapers, on the web, in blogs, above farmers heads. Real farmers are too busy to get caught up in the debate.

From my perspective, it is essential to make sure farmers and all their resources are prepared for durability of all 5.

Even [NJ farmer] Bob Muth, when you spend a lot of time with him, will explain that it was the creation of the family trust -- removing the land value equity risk and his eschewing of debt -- which is of equal importance to his farm's sustainability as the "sustainable practices" he employs. If his financial base was not solid as a rock, he could not do the rotations he does.

Okay, enough of Jack for today.

Where there is demand, an entrepreneur will follow, but who is sustaining whom?...

So it is in agriculture, as in any other business. If there is growing demand for locally produced food products, then there are opportunities for entrepreneurs to grow crops and livestock to sell to those consumers. Hence Vermont, which, according to Art Edelstein writing for vermontbiz.com, "boasts the highest percentage of people who buy locally grown food," is seeing an increasing number of small farms and new, young and entrepreneurial growers capitalizing on the locavore movement.

It's nice that the locavore movement is creating such opportunity. Small farms are getting much attention in the media, in the slow food movement and at USDA. Sustainable agriculture advocates often point to the small farm as the savior of ag, especially here in the Northeast. But are small farms really sustainable? In the vermontbiz article, the Green Mountain State's Agricultural Commissioner Roger Allbee indicates "the majority of food producing farms in the state other than dairy have less than 50 acres and the majority gross less than $50,000."

Indeed, the 2007 AgCensus figures just released in February show that across the country, there were 74,000 more farms with sales of less than $2,500 than in that category in the previous census five years earlier.

It's interesting that the AgCensus refers to “residential/lifestyle farms, with sales of less than $250,000.” $2,500, $50,000, $250,000... those are gross income figures. Any small business operator knows that when the expenses are paid at the end of the year, that's what the owner gets paid. Non-farmers earning wages in the $50-75K range think farmers grossing $250K are getting rich. Not so!

The article does point out, rightly so:

• One can make money because “farming is so entrepreneurial and there are so many micro niches.” It takes business savvy, sales and creativity, but about 90 percent fail, a number he says is consistent with other start-ups, according to John Cohen, Westminster, chairman of the Vermont Farmers Market Assoc.

• Despite claiming "add[ing] in the environment and an agricultural landscape and community and social benefit" makes small farms "absolutely successful businesses"..."in the final analysis," Mimi Arnstein, owner-operator of Wellspring CSA Farm, Marshfield says, “If a business is not financially sustainable it won’t be a business.” And "she admits and agrees that, “the biggest challenge is making enough money to pay myself and staff well. You have to sell a lot of zucchini to make the budget balance.”

It's tough to pull a living wage, let alone a salary, out of a $250,000 gross income. How then is agriculture sustainable if a farm business relies on supplemental off-farm income to maintain the farm family? Rather the hobby/part-time/lifestyle farm income supplements the family income to sustain the family, not vice versa.