That’s how long (or how short) it’s been since the steering committee of the Wooster Local Foods Cooperative, Inc., came together and began meeting regularly. And now another newborn has entered the world, and its proud parents’  dreams have come true: Local Roots Market opened its doors on Saturday, October 31.

As you might expect, enormous amounts of hard work went into bringing our plans to fruition. When I last updated you on the cooperative’s progress, we still had hopes of opening in September, but the bureaucratic pitfalls and obstacles kept stalling us as we tried to reach that goal:

Red tape challenges: It took us a while to figure out how the business should be classified for licensing. We viewed ourselves as a farmers market, except that the producer members paid a “retainage fee” that covered the market representing them in sales, but that didn’t fit the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s definition of a farmers market. And though we had serious initial concerns about being classed as a “retail food establishment” (RFE), worrying that this would cause undue hardship on producers, we asked questions and got reassuring answers from the ODA and from the Wayne County Board of Health.

Cash flow crunch: Thanks to that delay, as well as to the as-yet non-receipt of our grant funds (now due to arrive in December or January), we found ourselves stalled on purchasing the initial equipment — sinks and coolers, primarily — for the indoor market. As a result, our RFE license has been postponed until December 1. On the upside, waiting until then will give us a longer term on that license, but in the meantime, we still applied for a farmers market license and will have our producers sell at an indoor farmers’ market (where they staff their own booths) during November. (And we’ve been given yet more display units and equipment by our local grocery chain, Buehler’s.)

Techno hurdles: The online order system had some major snags along the way, but with the help of an outside database programmer, we managed to work out the bugs and get the system ready for our producer members to enter their information. This delay eventually worked in our favor, too, since we will not be able to have pick-up days until we have the RFE license in December.

Anchors a ways away: We have not made as much progress in working out details for our proposed “anchor” vendors as we had hoped, but we decided to get started on our own, anyway, and hope to bring in a coffee kiosk in the near future as well as to develop an in-house butcher shop when we create our commercial kitchen. Both of those anchors will be responsible for funding their own ventures, which will also affect the timetable for each to begin business, but we believe that they will add a great deal of value to the market.

Is your head spinning yet? Then you have an idea of what the past few months have been like for us. The stress of working through these major issues has caused many an argument in our meetings, but since everyone involved genuinely likes, respects, and appreciates one another and keeps the cooperative in mind in making all decisions, we have been able to work through conflicts and find a way forward — even finding creative new solutions along the way.

Ta-Da List

• Along with a phone line, we now have Internet service in the building as well as a computer set-up for a market office.

• On another work day in October, members of the steering committee sealed the cracks in the concrete floor in one quadrant of the building, bringing it up to the standards required by the Health Department for food-handling areas.

• The steering committee decided to have another work evening in lieu of its usual meeting this week and spent the time vacuuming and then steam-cleaning the carpet; patching, sanding, and painting walls; and getting things tidied up.

• Volunteers, including students from the Organic Farming Program House at The College of Wooster, have helped to spread the word and to distribute flyers around town.

• The fantastic website continues to win fans, and our column in the Wooster Weekly News has helped to spread the information about the market and give readers more ideas for appreciating seasonal, local produce.

• The monthly newsletter has begun to expand as other members contribute articles and recipes, and we’ve come up with a list of monthly themes to give ideas to other contributors and to add to our educational mission. (For November, American Diabetes Month, we’ve had a pair of articles that emphasize eating whole foods — easily made part of a locavore diet — in dealing with this lifestyle disease.)

All of this work has finally brought us around to Opening Day. On Saturday, October 31, we opened the doors to the community on the final day of the Downtown Farmers’ Market and welcomed everyone in for an open house. Members of the steering committee offered home-baked cookies (using local ingredients, of course), coffee, and good local cider to guests as people wandered through the building and learned more about what they will see in coming weeks.

Upcoming events

• On Saturdays in November, Local Roots will be open from 10 AM to 3 PM for the indoor farmers market, featuring many of our 20+ producer members who have signed up to date.

• On November 7 and 21, Local Roots will host a film series (“Fresh Food, Fresh Ideas”) to offer an entertaining and educational look at the American food system and at how we can do better. The first film, “Food, Inc.,” will be shown at The Big Picture, our downtown movie theatre, with a discussion afterward in the Local Roots building. On November 21, the Local Roots building will be the site of the screening of “PolyCultures,” a local documentary that shows how organizations across northeast Ohio are taking back control of their food supply. The filmmakers, Tom Kondilas and Brad Masi, will be on hand to share their thoughts on what they’ve seen since the film wrapped up production.

• On November 20, from 7 to 9:30 PM, Local Roots will hold a holiday open house during downtown Wooster’s annual Window Wonderland event (when families take a stroll around town as businesses unveil their holiday-decorated window fronts).

• On November 21, the indoor farmers market will expand into the first annual Holiday Market, where shoppers can find not only good local produce for the Thanksgiving feast but also delicious baked goods (yes, the Baklava Queen, yours truly, will even bake baklava for the event) and gift items by local artists and crafters. Best of all, we will have a very special guest on hand: Ohio farmer and author Gene Logsdon will sell and sign several of his books, including “All Flesh Is Grass” and “Small-Scale Grain Raising.”

Yes, that’s a lot of activity in the first month of business, and it has meant a great deal of work for the past few weeks to spread the word and get everything prepared for all of these events. Since we recognize we’re going to have a slightly slower start than we had hoped for, we want to find other ways to bring more people into the market and to get them used to being involved in Local Roots. We still need to increase our membership — and to bring in more membership fees to keep running the market — so every chance we get to talk to potential members and to welcome new faces to the crowd, we’ll take it.

And while we take a moment here and there to celebrate the sheer joy in knowing that we did it, we also know we have a lot more work ahead — and that it’s the kind of work that is truly worth doing.

Photo of garage door painting by Gretchen Tefs; all others by the author.

Why? Because, as you understand if you live in a rural community, our grocery store is one of the most important businesses in town.

Our store means more than just ready access to food and toilet paper. Rural grocery stores are small businesses, providing jobs and generating tax revenue that support the community. Without a local store, the payroll and tax revenue that our food purchases generate go elsewhere. When you have to leave town to buy groceries, it’s easier to pick up hardware, fill prescriptions, and buy clothes at the same time. The loss of a grocery store affects other businesses in a town as well.

Having a grocery store also helps attract new residents to a town. Similar to a school, a post office, restaurants, and churches, a grocery store makes a community a more attractive place to live. Grocery stores can also be social places where you run into neighbors in the produce aisle, introduce yourself to someone new in town, or catch up on local happenings with the cashier.

Case in point: while shopping this Sunday, I finally asked Sally, a cashier, what the big blue-and-orange numbers in the window meant. “It’s the bankroll!” she said, and handed me a punch card. I am now entered in a weekly drawing for $600 worth of groceries, but to win I have to have visited the store that week to have my card punched. That’s one way to build loyalty, and I now feel less like a newcomer and more like a member of the community. I’m in on the secret.

Not all small towns are as lucky as we are. The lack of a grocery store means residents have less access to healthy fresh fruits and vegetables, and the elderly and others without reliable transportation will tend to buy their food at convenience stores with more limited selections or go for longer periods of time between visits to the store.

Small-town grocery stores do face some unique challenges owing to the size of the communities they serve and the amount of inventory they can carry. An increasing number of creative solutions are emerging to meet these challenges. The best examples begin within the community and help residents identify a solution that works for their particular locale. Here are ways that several rural communities are keeping the grocery store open in their town.

Local ownership:  When city leaders in Stapleton, Nebraska, found that 95 percent of respondents to a survey wanted a grocery store in town, a local resident stepped up to the challenge and with the help of two local investors, a new store was under way. Many rural grocery stores are already owned by local businesspeople who understand the importance of their store to the community. Communities that are losing a store owned by an outside investor or regional chain should look inward for someone from the community willing to operate the store.

Cooperative ownership: A half hour was too far to drive to buy groceries for residents of Walsh, Colorado, reports the Denver Post, so this town of 723 people decided to solve the problem themselves. Over 300 of them pooled their money to re-open the grocery store. A $160,000 interest-free loan helped restock the shelves, and they were in business. One secret to their success is community engagement – residents know that the success of this cooperative venture depends on residents spending their grocery money in Walsh, and the store can be more responsive to the needs of the community because its members are co-owners.

Youth affiliated: About 10 years ago, the Nebraska Sandhills community of Arthur, Nebraska, lost their grocery store. With residents forced to drive 40 miles for groceries and some elderly residents relying on neighbors for delivery, community leaders decided to act. They enlisted an extracurricular entrepreneurial business development program with high school students: eight students undertook market research, identified support, rented a building, and, by the end of the year, opened the Wolf Den grocery store. (The school mascot is a wolf.) The grocery store in this town of just 144 people remains open to this day.

There are times when I worry about not having access to organic produce, or that the grocery distributor will someday choose not to deliver to my town’s store and I’ll be forced to take my food dollars somewhere else. But for now, I choose to support my community by shopping locally.

Wish me luck on winning next week’s bankroll!

As I wrote in my first post for Ethicurean, I’m a graduate student learning about Sustainable Agriculture in Europe who recently spent a semester at the University of Kassel in Germany. Its international organic agriculture program is located in the quaint village of Witzenhausen, surrounded by rolling fields of lush farmland and tidy bike paths and dotted with perfect villages separated by sustainably managed “community forests.”

I fell in love with the dense, sourdough rye breads, plethora of organic foods, and the high level of environmental concern and responsibility held by most of the people. For example, almost all food products sold there come in glass jars that are strictly recycled. My Food Quality course visited a facility that sanitized German glass jars and bottles, where we were told that they are able to reuse them safely about 26 times before needing to be crushed. I highly prefer this system over the vast sea of plastic containers in most American supermarkets.

More enjoyable than watching jars being sterilized was visiting the local farms by bicycle in the weeks following the end of the semester. Although some things like plant diseases, food safety guidelines, and European organic regulations are best learned from text in the classroom, there is definitely a time and place for real-world learning, especially when it comes to food systems.

I became interested in the locally available foods I had been eating: “Why does this yogurt taste so amazingly thick and fresh, like nothing I’ve ever had from a Stonyfield container? Who produced this raw honey that filled my mouth with a rich taste of the cherries growing on the nearby hills?” I was determined to meet farmers and learn about their efforts to build and support a more localized food system.

Jausen Station's restaurant

In an effort to keep this story a reasonable length for strained Internet-reader-eyes, I won’t delve into details about all the discoveries I made, such as the Curic family that keeps bees scattered throughout German forests and fields for their sweet, earthy-flavored honeys, or the well-known Jausen Station, a family-run restaurant that feeds more than 44,000 visitors a year almost entirely from their small farm of chickens, goats, pigs, grains, vegetable gardens, bakery, and sausage and cheese production facilities. With a lot of determination, map reading and pedal power I was able to learn a phenomenal amount about who was behind some of the delicious foods that remain a secret to people outside the valley.

Thinking outside the big-box stores

Some of my first visits included three organic food delivery businesses, a service that is becoming increasingly popular in Germany. One of my favorites, Gruener Bote (Green Box), is owned by Wolfgang Ostrhues. The foods are all organic and they strive to source local whenever possible, including breads, cheese, meats, eggs and summer vegetables. They started this year-round business 25 years ago and now have 20 employees, three bright green delivery vans, and 600 to 700 customers, depending on the season. The drivers often spend 10-12 hours a day delivering to elderly citizens and young families. The customers choose exactly what they want in their “green box” each week and can use the efficient online service to make their selections. These choices are seen on computer screens near the food items so the employees can efficiently pack the boxes before delivery.

Packing a Big Green Box from the computer order

Ostrhues confirmed that there is more and more interest in his services every year and that there are over 500 similar businesses in Germany, some of which cater to 3,000-plus clients. One of the biggest problems Ostrhues faces is the stiff competition from big-box grocery stores with lower organic prices. He is, however, able to advertise as supporting local farmers, and more Germans understand why it is important to do so instead of purchasing organic apples flown from New Zealand, for example. Ostrhues does not pursue any government funding — although there would be some available for his organic vegetable farm — because he prefers to, “work for the garden and not the government.” He said the amount of paperwork for such funding is overwhelming and as it is, he spends too much time stuck behind a computer.

I really enjoyed visiting the Ostrhues’ farm because of his commitment to quality and locally produced items. The family’s own fields grow beautiful leeks, lettuce, Swiss chard, beans, and several herbs as well as two greenhouses producing cucumbers and tomatoes.

The Middleman: sales outlet and educator

Local farms may be producing an abundance of delicious and creative items for sale, but to thrive they need a marketplace. One business reaching out to local producers is Absatzgenossenschaft Unterrieden (AGU) near the village of Witzenhausen. AGU sells only locally grown and processed products such as wine, liquor, juices, pasta, honey, cheese, sausages, and soap. The owner, Sylvia Mueller, commented that demand for local products is on the rise; I was surprised to see the shop was open from 9am-6pm every day of the week. Although there are fewer and fewer young farmers in the valley, Mueller hopes that if a outlet exists to support locally made items, growing and selling locally will become more feasible for farming youth who want to stay in the area. She told me about Kirshenbluten, which is the name for the special local currency of the village of Witzenahusen: it was launched as an incentive to hold people in the area and shop at local, family-owned stores.

Goats at Jausen Station farm

One of the most inspiring farms I have ever visited in my life was just a 30-minute bike ride from the campus of Witzenhausen. Holger and Michaele Schenke deserve every medal out there for hands-on organic farm-based education. Situated on a small knoll of lush fields overlooking a nearby castle and the Werra river, the Schul Bauernhof Hutzelberg (Teaching Farm) in the village of Oberrieden is truly a site of beauty. The dynamic husband and wife team both have agricultural diplomas from Witzenhausen and started this farm school 10 years ago. Rather than provide food for the local community, their intention is to offer comprehensive lessons about sustainable living to visitors who stay for an entire week.

Just a short walk from their home is the attractive building where groups of school children or families on holiday sleep and prepare meals from the farm’s bounty while gazing across the Werra River to a typical German scene; a dignified castle proudly perched on a knoll. Each day of the week is devoted to learning a new topic (making cheese from the cows’ milk; harvesting produce from the garden; grinding grains grown on the farm to make bread; feeding the rabbits, pigs, sheep and geese; shearing the sheep; making honey and learning about processing meat). Traditional tool making is also taught, as well as basic organic farming principles.

The students typically come with their teachers and are the chefs for the week. Although the Schenkes must find funding every year on their own, they are inspired by the fact that more and more interns contact them to volunteer on the farm, living there for free and teaching part-time while learning a wealth of knowledge about how to sustain one’s family from the land. The owners did express concern about being able to keep their prices low enough to be affordable to schools and to attract German tourists that want to experience an educational holiday. (I think Americans would have a blast at this place and wonder if they would consider hosting international visitors.)

Smart policy for rural businesses

Funding for organic agriculture-focused projects is always at the forefront of concerns for independent farmers and educators such as the Schenkes, Ostrhues, and Mueller. One helpful solution is coming from the government — often an unlikely place of support. The EU’s Rural Development Plan (2007-2013) is aimed at assisting projects that help to maintain the vitality of declining rural communities through farming, value-added products, or other means. While living in Witzenhausen, I knew about a small business called Troki, owned by Robert Witlake, that dries local fruits (cherries, apples, apricots) and vegetables. Witlake was able to receive 30% of the purchasing money for his business from this EU program because Witzenhausen is classified as an “endangered” village. he also supports local wheat growers to make pasta as well as processing the local fruit into jams. Several growers have now come to depend on his business as a way to keep their farm running and provide a viable income for their family. Businesses such as Troki have the chance to indirectly support the beauty of the landscape, local farming knowledge, biodiversity and the strong sense of a safe and happy community that is such a wonderful part of the Werra River valley.

The link between rural development plans and local food production is an important one, and as I traveled around Europe last year, always drooling over the impeccable landscapes and deeply-ingrained food traditions, I began to appreciate the importance of how policy is intricately linked to food. While I am an enormous fan of Europe, I have become increasingly proud of small steps being taken closer to home. The purpose of this entry is not to make readers envious of Europeans but instead to become aware of new opportunities now in the United States.

Kathleen Merrigan, the current Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, has recently sent out a memo, “Harnessing USDA rural development programs to support local and regional food systems,” which highlights existing funding opportunities for projects and initiatives such as the exciting ones I discovered in Germany. (See this Grist article for analysis and a link to a PDF of the memo.) The three programs outlined include the Community Facilities Program, The Business Industry Guarantee Loan Program, and the Value-Added Producer Grant Program. I haven’t met anyone that has taken advantage of these funding opportunities, but if any readers have, please post a comment!

Photo of fish cages from SantiMB's Flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

Aquaculture currently supplies more than 50% of the fish and shellfish consumed by humans worldwide. Part of the diet of farmed sea creatures (salmon being the most notable example) includes wild fish that have been converted into fish meal or fish oil.  But, as the two articles reveal, shrimp and “good fish” like carp and tilapia also eat fish. Not nearly as much as the piscavores do, but when the whole industry is considered, it adds up to a lot of fish.

With nearly all fisheries either fully exploited or over-exploited, and demand for farmed seafood likely to continue its rapid increase, preventing the aquaculture industry from causing massive disruption of ocean ecosystems in its search for fish food needs to be a major priority.

(Note: The 50% statistic comes from the PNAS article. For the remainder of this post, when a figure is from the PNAS article, I will cite it with [PNAS]. When a figure is from the Aquaculture article, I will cite it with [Aq]. The full citations for the two articles are at the bottom of this post.)

In the first of a two-part series on these two aquaculture articles, I’ll provide some background on the “feeding fish to fish” situation. In the second, I’ll present some of the alternatives to wild fish that are described in the PNAS article.

Aquaculture explodes: Up 6,000% since 1950

In just a few decades, aquaculture has gone from a mostly local activity to a globalized industry with feed, technology, and the final product traveling all over the world. The figure below shows the explosive growth in farmed fish production since 1950: from under a million metric tons in 1950 to almost 60 million metric tons in 2005. (One metric ton is 1,000 kilograms.  Data are from the FIGIS database in the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.) Most of the production — and probably most of the consumption — is in the Asia Pacific region: in 2006, that region produced 61.6 million metric tons of aquaculture products; Europe, 1.98  million metric tons; the Americas, 2.12 million metric tons; and Africa, 0.70  million metric tons [Aq].
Feeding the beasts: Almost 20% of captured wild fish go to aquaculture

Supplying more than half of the world’s seafood requires a lot of feed. For most fish — even “good fish” like tilapia and carp — the feed is a combination of plant-based ingredients and fish-based ingredients. For ease of handling and consistency, fish-based ingredients are typically in the form of fish meal, a uniform powder made from rendered fish parts, or fish oil, an oil extracted from fish parts.  In general, the raw ingredients for fish meal and oil are the class of small fish called “reduction fish” or “forage fish,” which includes sardines, herring, members of the anchovy family, and menhaden. (See related Ethicurean guest post on the importance of menhaden, by Alice Friedemann, and my post at Mental Masala about the California sardine fishery). As a rough approximation, a metric ton of raw fish yields about 225 kg of fish meal and 50 kg of fish oil [Aq].

Fulfilling the needs of the fish meal and fish oil factories requires a surprisingly high fraction of the overall catch. Almost one-third of the wild fish caught around the world, according to a 2005 review in Annual Review of Environment and Resources, goes to make the products. For 2001, the authors of that review estimated that of the 95 million metric tons  captured from wild fisheries, 68% of the fish went to direct human consumption, while 32% was converted to fish meal and oil (7% was discarded at sea.)

Pulau Ketam fish farms in Malaysia (iStockphoto)

Most of that fish meal and fish oil goes to aquaculture. In 2006, of the 3.724 million metric tons of fish meal produced, 68.2% went to aquaculture; of 0.835 million metric tons of fish oil produced, aquaculture used 88.5% [Aq]. The remaining fish meal and fish oil goes to a variety of products including fertilizer, livestock feed, and nutritional supplements.

Even “good fish” eat a lot of fish

The top fish meal consumers in 2006 were marine shrimp, salmon, and Chinese carp. In that same year, the top fish oil consumers were salmon, marine fish, and trout [Aq]. The graphs below show the total amount of raw fish needed to produce the fish meal and oil that’s fed to farmed seafood, first the total and then broken out by species (mmt in the y-axis label is million metric tons).*

When we look at the total amount of wild fish turned into food for their farmed brethren, we see a doubling between 1995 and 2005, followed by a moderate decrease that was primarily caused by rising fish meal and oil prices. The overall production of fish meal and fish oil was relatively constant during that period [PNAS], so aquaculture’s increase is the result of its growing share of total use. The farmed salmon industry consumes the most fish, followed by shrimp, which has been increasing its share in recent years. Other big users are trout and “marine fish” such as Japanese amberjack, Seriola quinqueradiata; gilt-head bream, Sparus aurata; cobia, Rachycentron canadum; and numerous other species.

Carp and tilapia together, which are often considered “good” fish because they can be raised on plants alone, consume about 50% less than salmon. Adding fish products to carp and tilapia feed increases growth rates, so it has become part of some feed systems, but the practice is fairly sensitive to price, as the drop off in the most recent years corresponds to a sharp increase in fish meal and oil prices [Aq].

What’s the catch?

Overall, the two articles tell a “good news, bad news” story. The good news is that the aquaculture industry is learning how to produce more farmed seafood while using less wild fish in their feed. A prime motivation for this is higher prices for fish meal and fish oil. For many reasons — increased demand from a growing aquaculture industry, higher energy costs, a fixed supply of reduction fish, to name a few — prices have almost quadrupled since 1994.

A commercial Atlantic Salmon farm in Tasmania, Australia (iStockphoto)

And yet, high prices for fish meal and fish oil raise other concerns, most notably the specter of overfishing: the incentive is to catch as much as possible while prices are good without regard to the future of the fishery — or the other creatures that depend on the fish, like birds and marine mammals. Furthermore, since the timing of price increases corresponds to a period during which a variety of fisheries are collapsing or have collapsed (such as Atlantic cod, Pacific salmon, bluefin tuna), it is not inconceivable that certain governments will provide subsidies to retool the nation’s ships to catch small fish like sardines, herring, or anchoveta to keep fishing crews working and avoid political problems.

The globalization of the aquaculture food chain is another bit of bad news. With fish caught in one place, processed in plants in another location, and then fed to farmed fish in yet another location, it becomes difficult to trace the fish-to-fish food chain back to the beginning. Additionally, reduction-fish factories can be put on ships in international waters — during the heyday of the California sardine fishery in the 1930s, reduction ships operated three miles off-shore to avoid California law.

Transparency is not the farmed-fish industry’s strong point. Many people believe that tilapia and other non-piscavores are fed a completely fish-free diet; sustainable fishing organizations and the fish companies themselves should provide us with information about the makeup and source of farmed fish feed.  We definitely have the technology to keep track of what a fish was fed — imagine bar codes on each pen of fish, bar codes on each bag of feed, and so on, all feeding into a database that creates a report that travels with the packaged fish.

Then there’s the meat industry’s use of fish products. The 2005 review cited above reported that the livestock industry consumed nearly 20% of all fish caught for feed additives in 2001. But have you ever seen a label on a package of bacon that says “our hog feed has 1% fish meal,” or conversely, “grown without wild fish”? I don’t think so. And so, with the oceans under intense stress from all directions, it is time for a marine advocacy organization to create a certification campaign around fish products in livestock feed.

Fortunately, there are a number of feed alternatives for farmed seafood that do not rely on forage fish. The PNAS article provides a succinct review of some of them, including their pros and cons, which I’ll review in part 2 of this series.

Postscript: Far more factors than fish feed have a negative impact

In this entire post, I haven’t mentioned any other consequences from aquaculture, but they can be as significant as the “fish eating fish” component. Farmed salmon, for example, which gets the “Avoid” rating from Seafood Watch, has a lot of negative impacts on ecosystems, including fish escape (which can spread disease and interfere with the local gene pool), huge amounts of fish waste in small areas, parasites, and more.  The New York Times recently covered Chile’s current problems, and other salmon issues are painstakingly documented in the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch report on farmed salmon (PDF). Shrimp also cause plenty of trouble, from destruction of mangrove swamps, which act as “nurseries of the ocean” and protect land from storms, to terrestrial pollution — plenty of nasty chemicals are used to grow shrimp and improve their appearance, some of which can carry through to the final product — to harm to local farmers, as the book “Bottomfeeder,” by Taras Grescoe (see my review for  Ethicurean) compellingly describes. Other species have similar issues. Oysters and other filter-feeding mollusks, however, can actually clean the water, as they feed on algae and nutrients that negatively affect water quality.

References

“Feeding aquaculture in an era of finite resources,” Rosamond L. Naylor, Ronald W. Hardy, Dominique P. Bureau, and others, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (36), 15103–15110, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0905235106. Summaries available from Stanford University and Environmental Research Web.

“Global overview on the use of fish meal and fish oil in industrially compounded aquafeeds: Trends and future prospects,” Albert G.J. Tacon and Marc Metian, Aquaculture 285 (2008) 146–158, doi:10.1016/j.aquaculture.2008.08.015

*I followed an approach in the Aquaculture article to estimate the mass of fish required to produce the fish oil and fish meal for several types of fish and in total.

For me, though, when the leaves turn into one briefly shimmering array of jewel tones and the mercury starts to tumble, I’m finally ready for apples. In this neck of the woods, I can find berries galore through the summer, but the quintessential Ohio fruit has always been — in my mind, at least — the humble apple.

Maybe that’s because like other Ohio schoolchildren, I was raised on the legend of Johnny Appleseed, a raggle-taggle fellow walking barefoot across the state with a saucepan on his head and a handful of seeds that he scattered along the way. While it’s true that John Chapman did ramble across the area, he actually was more of a nurseryman, planting seedlings and nurturing orchards.

None of his original orchards remain, but drive down almost any country highway in the state, and you’ll likely run into an apple orchard one place or another. Here in Wayne County, we’re blessed with three or four large commercial orchards and many more homestead plantings. Come fall, trees everywhere are loaded with deep red and sparkling yellow fruit that instantly makes my mouth water.

With Malus toward none

The apple (Malus spp.) turns out to be a versatile fruit in the kitchen. Of the hundreds of varieties of apples, only a handful tend to be grown commercially, such as the Red and Golden Delicious, McIntosh, Jonathan, Gala, and Granny Smith known to us all. But when you start looking at what local orchards have available, names like Cortland, Freedom, Macoun, Mollie, and Wolf River provide a peek at how widely apples have adapted to different regions and how extensively they are used. The official state apple of Ohio — Melrose, a locally developed variety — suits almost any kind of use, even storage, and is almost big enough to feed a family. (Well, not quite, but it did take two hands to pick. That’s it perched on the top of the bowl pictured.)

Harvest season begins in July with Transparent apples, which make a nice, sweet-tart sauce, and extends well into fall with the solid storage varieties of Honeycrisp, Northern Spy, and Winesap. Flavors range from a clean sweet taste to a crisp, sharp bite, and at any given time there’s bound to be something to please any palate. Most orchards offer a chart of varieties (published by the Ohio Apple Association, a wealth of information) indicating which apples are best for eating out of hand, turning into apple sauce, or baking in pies.

It’s enough to make any true gourmet giddy with the possibilities. A friend and I enjoy holding an apple taste test come fall, trying to decide which variety we most enjoy eating fresh. Even kids have fun learning about the different kinds of apples: I recently took my nephews picking at one of the local orchards, and they insisted on picking samples of each of the varieties so that they could try them all. I barely had to do any of the work; they thoroughly enjoyed the adventure of searching for their “prize winning” apples to show their parents. My work will come soon when we turn some of those excellent apples into applesauce and perhaps even a pie.

Supply cider economics

And since we’re talking about the many culinary uses for apples, let’s not forget my favorite: cider. Pressed to release all their juicy flavors, apples turned into cider make a satisfying addition to any meal — and for me, at this time of year, that means almost every meal. The best ciders combine different varieties of apples, mingling sharp, sweet, bitter-sharp, and bittersweet flavors for a more robust drink. (The book “Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider, Third Edition” by novelist Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols is packed with information on how to make truly good cider, and it’s got me yearning for my own cider press.)

When you have the chance to sample cider from different orchards, you can start to pick up on some of these different flavors. I recently had two gallons of cider on hand — one from a small local mill and one from a local farmer who took a selection of her apples to a friend’s press — and enjoyed a revelatory taste testing with a friend. Whether I was influenced by personal bias or discovered that raw cider really was different than pasteurized, I found the farmer’s cider to have a more complex flavor that was about as close as you could get to sticking a straw into an apple and slurping down the juice.

Bake to the kitchen

Come Saturdays throughout fall, I’m likely to head into the kitchen and simmer a pot of cider on the stove (or in a slow cooker) with a sprinkling of cinnamon bark, whole cloves, and dried orange peel while I slip into my annual cold-weather baking groove. How appropriate it is, then, that apples play a starring role in many comforting, old-fashioned desserts. I can’t let myself get to Thanksgiving without having baked at least one classic pie or even a decadent buttery tarte tatin, but I’ll often bake another with an herbal twist: a touch of rosemary and orange peel, a dash of lavender, or even with cardamom and rose petals, topped with a thin syrup of honey and pomegranate molasses (recipes at the links on my other blog).

I also enjoy pairing apples with oatmeal and brown sugar. Sometimes that’s just in a simple bowl of oatmeal, cooked with the other two ingredients, but sometimes it comes in the form of my aunt’s “apple stuff” (apples baked just with a secret streusel topping) or in the apple pie squares (left; based on my favorite date bars) I tried one chilly evening this fall. The combination also makes for good muffins or a wonderful coffee cake.

If you’re not a fan of sweet dishes for any reason, you’ll be happy to know that apples work well in savory recipes, too, adding a hint of wholesome sweetness while also providing a little natural pectin to thicken the mixture. I like shredding an apple into hash browns with onions and thyme (add crumbled sausage, too, if that’s what you like), and chunks of apples can add a pleasant difference in texture in a saute with squash. Even sauteed on their own with onions and herbs, you can have a flavorful bruschette topping for parties. Chicken lovers may find that apples enhance a curry dish, and who hasn’t seen the age-old image of a roast pig with an apple in its mouth?

By the end of winter, I’ll be heartily sick of apples and not want to touch the mealy morsels again for months. Not surprisingly: the apples that keep that long can end up feeling sort of mushy in your mouth. But right now, I can’t get enough of my native fruit — and I’m pretty happy about that.

High school was the last time I’d made out clamming until a recent outing with author Langdon Cook. This time, the clam dig was entirely literal, and chaste: we each bagged our limit of littleneck clams on a Key Peninsula beach.

The essays in Cook’s “Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager” describe expeditions in search of sometimes more challenging catches than the clams we scratched from that gravelly beach. While plucking 40 littlenecks each from the sand in under 5 minutes might not have had the suspense of wresting steelhead from a river, the simple, delightful meal Cook prepared from our catch (recipe below) could compete with any of the enticing recipes he presents at the end of each of the book’s adventures. As we enjoyed our clams with a cold beer, the tide rolled in under a warm sun and we watched an osprey carry food to its young. I felt blessed to live among such beauty and bounty.

Cook offers his search for fish, shellfish, mushrooms, and berries as a way into understanding this place he’s come to call home. As he told me on our dig, “It’s a love letter to Seattle.” And part of the book’s appeal is that it is so place-specific. Like Timothy Egan’s “The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest,” to which “Fat of the Land” owes a debt of gratitude, Cook’s essays explore what is quintessentially Northwest: its rivers and salmon, mountains and clearcuts. Both books address the region’s human and natural history and its present ecology, and ponder how we change its geography and how its geography changes us.

“Foraging at the dawn of the 21st century is a weird mix of opportunity and regret,” writes Cook. “On the one hand, you can go just about anywhere with a decent road map and a sense of adventure. On the other, these places reveal glimpses into a long-gone past that was surely a forager’s paradise.”

Food gives the book an appeal beyond the Northwest. Like the immigrant foragers Cook describes, readers may find different species here than in their home places, but the pursuit is familiar. Those who’ve never dived for ling cod, but who grow their own kale or buy beef from farmers they’ve befriended, will respond to Cook’s endeavors to nourish himself by his own efforts, feeding his family with good food from places he knows.

His skill as a storyteller in part lies in his ability simultaneously to teach and entertain. As a guide to foraging, “Fat of the Land” is inspirational more than instructional. But Cook does offer facts about overfishing, toxins, flavor, nutrition — even a dash of politics and jurisprudence — woven into his literary allusions and anecdotes about diving with his buddies.

Cook shows up in his tales as a character, a sometimes-bumbling, sometimes-expert outdoorsman who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is salty, punny, and occasionally moving, a cross between the ferry captain and the fisherman he once finds himself between on a bar stool in Ballard. He’s Cliff Clavin with his facts straight.

Cook is talented at drawing a character sketch, whether of himself or his companions — the friends who encourage and teach him or figure things out alongside him. I laughed out loud reading about his oversized buddy Ivar in an undersized wetsuit fumbling with a crab, man and crustacean both waving their limbs like mad. But he doesn’t always get it right. His implication that a fellow squid jigger might be a gang member because of his Raiders jacket seemed unfounded and did little to illuminate the man’s character. Other distractions arise from poor editing. Several times, something or someone appears in the text without explanation, only to be introduced as though for the first time paragraphs or pages later. The reader is left with the idea that Cook or his editor cut and pasted paragraphs without subsequently smoothing over the holes and patches.

But overall, “Fat of the Land” is an entertaining and informative read that suffers little from these flaws. Though it is neither fiction nor field guide, travelogue nor cookbook, the book offers elements of each. Above all, it is a testament to the power of food to root a person in the context of family, friends, season, and region.

Steamed Clams with Sausage, Tomato & Garlic
courtesy of Langdon Cook

1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 lb Italian sausage
1 small onion, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, chopped
1/4 cup vermouth
1 small can diced tomatoes
1 tsp fresh thyme
1 tsp fresh oregano
pinch red pepper flakes
1-2 lbs littleneck clams, scrubbed
bunch parsley
good bread for sopping

Heat olive oil in heavy pot over medium-high heat. Crumble sausage into pot and cook until lightly browned. Add onions and garlic and saute until translucent. De-glaze with vermouth. Add tomatoes and spices, stir, and cook a few more minutes. Raise heat, dump clams into pot, and cover. After a few minutes, give clams a stir, and continue cooking with lid on until all clams are open. Stir in a handful of chopped parsley. Ladle clams into bowls with liquid and eat with bread.

Editor’s note: The Ethicurean maintains a comprehensive list of books about sustainable food and agriculture and related topics at Goodreads.com. You can see what we’re reading via the Goodreads widget in the righthand column (and if you click on one of those book covers to purchase it via Amazon.com, you’ll be helping us out financially, at no extra cost to you.) To browse our collective library and read previous reviews, visit our Goodreads bookshelf.

The national health care debate (or, all too often in August, temper tantrum) is one recent case where understanding the mental process can be helpful.  “Status-Quo Anxiety”, a recent column by New Yorker financial columnist James Surowiecki, shows how some findings from the field of behavioral economics apply to health care. Some of what he discusses is also applicable to our national conversation on food.

The first effect presented by Surowiecki is the “endowment effect”:  when we own something, we tend to overestimate its value. The effect has been shown in many experiments using everyday objects like mugs or event tickets, with the owners of the objects consistently charging far more than buyers are willing to pay.

The second effect is “status quo bias”: people desire stability and maintenance of current conditions even when that condition is bad for them. In general, people feel more pain from losses than they feel pleasure from gains, and so as the health care debate swirls, more are focusing on what might be lost when the health landscape changes than on what might be gained. In addition, they tend to overestimate the value what they might lose.

Surowiecki concludes his column with some suggestions on how reform advocates can use these effects to their advantage.  A more effective angle, he argues, would be that reform is necessary if you want to keep what you have, because the system is heading into chaos. Furthermore, the current insurance system allows all sorts of abuses in the name of higher profits, like rescission (the heinous practice of canceling an insurance policy once someone actually needs it), making it difficult for people with pre-existing conditions to get insurance, and rationing by insurance companies in the form of provider networks, treatment denials and so on.

I see the two effects in the column in our national discussion about food.

Consider the “endowment effect,” which has a somewhat tenuous connection to food. It’s likely that many people feel a sense of ownership of whichever food system they take part in — the industrial system for the vast majority, and various alternatives for a few percent. After all, we take part in our own customized food system many times a day by eating, shopping, or planning our meals.  And, through our demand for convenience and low prices, we helped make it happen (with a lot of help from the food industry telling us that cooking from scratch was for fools and from the government by subsidizing cheap calories).  And so we might overvalue the system itself: the convenience, low-prices (at the check-out anyway, since many externalities like water pollution and worker mistreatment are paid at another time or shifted to the future), think that it is worth far more than it should be.

The “status quo bias” is much stronger. Since people desire stability and overvalue loss, discussions about changes in the food system can cause people to overemphasize potential reductions in convenience, the hassle of adapting to new routines (cooking instead of getting take-out or pre-made items), the shock of trying new foods, reduced access to some foods, and much more. There is a certain amount of linkage with the endowment effect, especially as it relates to

These two effects — and many others that Surowiecki did not mention, like the inability of humans to think far into the future, the difficulty in getting our minds around a system that is opaque as the one that gets food from farms to our plates — probably need to be considered by those crafting messages about food system reform, as does the work on “framing” by linguist George Lakoff and others.

Highlighting the potentially positive results of food-system changes instead of talking about what people will need to give up could be one way to avoid being tripped up. Some examples include:  “Wednesday is vegetarian Indian food night” (a variation of the “Wednesday is Prince spaghetti day” campaign of the past), which offers the opportunity to explore the wonderful (and seemingly infinite) vegetarian cuisine of India. Or the “vegan before dinnertime” diet proposed by Mark Bittman, which was a significant change to the Times columnist’s diet for part of his day but resulted in him feeling more energetic, carrying around fewer pounds, and with less knee pain (as this post from the NY Times’ WellBlog indicates). And finally, cooking from scratch more often instead of getting takeout offers an opportunity for the comradeship and tasty meals of cooking with a friend. What positive messages are you spreading about food-system change?

This is the third in a series about the USDA hearings on an industry proposal for a food-safety marketing agreement for leafy green vegetables. My first post describes what marketing agreements are and do; my second covers the first day of testimony, which was dominated by industry supporters of the agreement.

It’s Wednesday morning and I am considering the logistics of a slow-release intravenous whiskey drip. Hearings on the proposal for a National Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (NLGMA) were originally scheduled for three days, but thanks to the industry’s 31-witness lineup, the judge is thinking of extending them for an extra day. As it is, we will be going strong for 11 hours today, from 8am to 7pm, with similar hours expected tomorrow. Who knew so many things could be said about lettuce?

The industry proponent group is chomping at the bit to get more of their witnesses on today, but the judge (spurred by a savvy lawyer working for the National Organic Coalition) has decided to go quid pro quo: opponents can call some, industry can call some, and random stragglers will be accommodated as they arrive.

A roundup follows of the main points that witnesses present against the proposal for the NLGMA. First, though, bear with me through one general observation:

The purpose of these hearings is to help the USDA’s Ag Marketing Service (AMS) decide whether to let big produce buyers move ahead with developing a marketing agreement for food safety. If it goes forward, and if companies around the country sign on, then farmers selling leafy green vegetables like lettuce, spinach and chard to those companies will be required to implement certain “safe food” practices on their farms. Given how diverse our agricultural sector is, one would think that AMS (which, incidentally, runs the National Organic Program) would want to maximize the number and diversity of farmers providing testimony at these hearings.

But not only has AMS chosen to hold the hearings during harvest time, it is holding hearings that are time-intensive and, frankly, extremely intimidating. I’m not saying that I don’t think farmers can hold their own up there on the stand. But when the first opponent witness, an experienced lobbyist with the National Organic Coalition, is cross-examined for nearly two hours, I wonder why anyone in their right mind would agree to do this if they were not getting paid. (In this blog post, Elisa Odabashian of Consumers Union describes it as “very different from all of the previous hearings at which I have testified… [it] seemed less like other federal hearings where public input is gathered, and more like a trial of those who disagree with this industry proposal.”)

Perhaps more importantly, many farmers in this part of California would be testifying against a proposal that was written by the companies they sell to, with company representatives in the room. So is it really fair to claim that this process gets AMS a sufficient window into “public opinion” of the NLGMA? Please.

That said, on Wednesday morning, a valiant crew shows up to oppose the proposal. Many of them work for nonprofits and get paid to attend these sorts of meetings, but some are farmers or just interested consumers. Major props, y’all.

And here’s what they have to say:

Reason #1 AMS should drop the National Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement: Because AMS is not a food safety agency, and food safety is not a marketing issue.

By its own admission, AMS does not do food safety. Its staff is made up of economists and marketing specialists; its mandate is to facilitate the marketing of U.S. agricultural products. As I described in my first post, marketing agreements usually do just that: they help ensure consistent quality, like lettuce heads that are plump and uniform, tomatoes that are perfectly round, or beef that is heavily marbled. (No comment on whether this particular consumer would actually want such things…) So what is AMS doing getting involved in a marketing agreement that would require its signatories to implement certain “safe food” farming practices, or testing, processing, or shipping protocols, when it has no expertise in this area?

The AMS staff present at the hearing don’t seem worried about venturing into uncharted territory — in fact, they seem excited about it. (Incidentally, a new marketing agreement would mean a new AMS program, new funding, and new staff promotions.) When an opposing witness calls AMS out on its lack of food-safety expertise, marketing specialist Melissa Schmaedick, who’s leading the government’s questioning, asks the witness whether she herself is an expert on marketing agreements. So now only lawyers are fit to have an opinion on this thing?

Because marketing agreements are supposed to ensure the consistent quality of foods, AMS staff seem hell-bent on getting opposing witnesses to admit that food safety is a quality issue in order to establish AMS jurisdiction. “Would you consider food safety to be important to that food’s quality?” they ask again and again. Witnesses from consumer groups put up a fight: safety is different. Safety is a bottom line. “Whether or not a product has been grown and processed in a way that minimizes the chance that it contains pathogens that could cause illness is not a quality attribute,” says Food & Water Watch’s Patty Lovera in her testimony [pdf]. “It is a critical issue that rises above other characteristics like size, variety, or appearance.”  “Safety should not be something that consumers must search out and possibly pay extra for” (as is the case for, say, USDA prime beef), says Consumers Union’s Odabashian (testimony here, pdf).

“But if food is contaminated, would you still say it’s quality?” press AMS staff. Argh! Of course not.

Let the record show that they said the safety of food affects its quality.

Reason #2 to drop the NLGMA: Because the industry should not be allowed to write its own food safety rules.

In my last post, I explained how skewed the makeup of the NLGMA’s oversight board is toward big industry. CU’s Odabashian hits this point hard: “Allowing the leafy green industry to set and oversee its own safety standards, without public input, is undemocratic and contrary to key legal precedents in the regulatory field…. The proposed marketing agreement presently under consideration would allow the leafy green industry to develop its own safety standards virtually all by itself, with only a minor tip of the hat to public input. In terms of product safety, consumers are rarely benefited when industry polices itself.” Damn straight.

(A brief diversion: During the testimony of one of the consumer witnesses, someone discovers that the communications director from the industry group Western Growers, which helped author the NLGMA proposal, is trash-Tweeting the opposition from the back of the hearing room. Incidentally, this is the same guy who had dragged a massive binder to the stand on Tuesday as evidence of all the ways he’s reaching out to the opposition to bring them into the process so they can help shape the agreement. Good luck with that now, buddy!)

Reason #3 to drop the NLGMA: Because if it looks anything like the California LGMA, it won’t work for small, organic, or biodiverse producers.

California already has a Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, developed by the same altruistic band of industry folks that’s proposing the NLGMA. Witnesses today look at what’s happened in California for a sign of (disturbing) things to come if the NLGMA goes forward.

According to the Wild Farm Alliance’s Jo Ann Baumgartner (testimony here, pdf), the California agreement blames wild animals for bringing pathogens like E. coli 0157:H7 onto farms. Since animals are deemed a risk, wildlife habitat, which the agreement calls “harborage” (drumming up images of camouflage-clad terrorist deer) is a risk too. “USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and other agencies and nonprofits have invested millions in farm conservation efforts that are now in jeopardy [due to industry food-safety requirements],” says Baumgartner. “Farmers are forced to choose between buyer’s demands and stewardship practices” like vegetation around fields, which, as it happens, has been shown filter pathogens like E. coli out of dust and water. This vegetation also helps attract beneficial insects and pollinators; see Marc’s post for more information on why they’re so important.

Studies like this one from the CA Department of Fish and Game, says Baumgartner, suggest that wild animals aren’t the problem. (The biggest source of E. coli 0157:H7 is cattle, whose manure can leach into surface and groundwater that is then pumped through farms’ irrigation lines. Incidentally, the nation’s salad bowl is also home to some of its largest dairies and beef feedlots. Just sayin’…)

But due to industry food safety demands, farmers are racing to seal their farms from wild animal intrusion (as if that were actually possible). The director of Monterey Coastkeeper shows photos of bare-ground “buffers” between fields and the Salinas River, of poison bait traps set out for mice and birds, and of the same poison traps submerged in water that drains to the river after a rain. He also mentions during his testimony that an industry rep from Metz Fresh, a company that participates in the California LGMA, threatened him with a lawsuit when he sat down to wait his turn to testify. (Yep, this hearing is definitely welcoming all comers with open arms!)

It’s no surprise that these kinds of requirements are difficult or impossible for diversified and organic/sustainable farmers to meet. And honestly, even if they could meet them, would we want them to? “It would be unfortunate and ironic,” says Steve Etka of the National Organic Coalition, “if an agreement intended to enhance food safety were to create incentives for farmers to move away from sustainable farming systems, which are designed to reduce toxic loads in the water, soil and air, and to instead promote the use of large scale, monocultural farming systems that we believe to be of higher risk.” (Testimony here, pdf.)

Other witnesses worry that if the NLGMA goes through, mainstream access to food from sustainable farms will remain a pipe dream. Instead of complying with rules written by and for Big Ag, small and midsize farms will stop selling to wholesalers and institutions that require compliance with the NLGMA. (See testimony [all pdfs] from Bu Nygrens of the Bay Area distribution company Veritable Vegetable, Garth Kahl from the organic certifier Oregon Tilth, and Josh Hinerfeld from wholesaler Organically Grown Company.)

So long, SOLE?

This last point hits me particularly hard. If we want SOLE food to get beyond niche markets, we need to encourage relationships between sustainable farms and wholesalers, larger retailers, and institutions. These buyers are increasingly requiring assurance (read: documentation at a minimum, often an audit) that the farms they buy from are following practices to reduce the risk that their vegetables will become contaminated. These requirements aren’t going away; and groups like those that authored the NLGMA are muscling in to define which farming practices buyers should consider “safe.”

The challenge for those of us who care about sustainable farms’ survival as well as safe food is to find ways to help all farms provide food safety assurance, but to do so using practices that are in line with their philosophies, production systems, and what the science says about the biggest sources of risk. A number of organizations around the country are already starting to do this kind of outreach and education with sustainable farms, including California’s Community Alliance with Family Farmers (whose policy director, Dave Runsten, is slated to testify Thursday); Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association; and Virginia’s Appalachian Harvest. As a community, we must also broaden the public focus to include food safety threats like industrial livestock operations, chemical pesticide manufacturers, and a government that has allowed a few enormous companies to control most of our food supply.

It’s clear that the good-food community needs to engage on the issue of food safety. Unless we’re content to let sustainable food remain a niche industry, we can’t keep insisting that buyers take it on faith that small equals safe, even though the vast majority of outbreaks are linked to the industrial food supply. But it’s also clear that this proposal — an industry-led agreement overseen by an agency that wants to market safety like it markets perfectly round, red, and tasteless tomatoes — has the least potential of any policy process to integrate the perspectives and realities of sustainable farms, not to mention those of independent scientists. That’s why our first step must be to stop it in its tracks.

Hearings on the NLGMA will continue through October 22nd; see this site for a list of locations and times, and show up to voice your concerns if you can. After they’ve concluded, AMS will decide whether or not to let the industry start developing the agreement. If it comes to that, there will be a number of opportunities to influence the process over the next year or so, and I’ll be back with updates. But for everyone’s sake, I really hope I won’t be.

Last fall, when I picked up a first edition of Gene Logsdon’s “Small-Scale Grain Raising,” I knew I’d have to try growing some of my own grains for bread or other baking projects. After reviewing the new edition of Logsdon’s book earlier this year, I was ready to put my plans into action.

I let optimism guide me into buying seed for winter wheat, hull-less oats, and buckwheat — along with a broadcast seeder — with my other seeds from Fedco this year. I didn’t really have a place to plant them, but in winter, details like that seem immaterial.

Suddenly, spring arrived, and the place where I thought I’d be able to plant my grain crops turned out not to have enough space. That’s when the seeds of a beautiful new friendship were sown.

Thanks to my involvement in Local Roots, I’ve met a handful of other enthusiastic, like-minded people: some have a good deal of farming experience, and others are just learning. One of the wannabe farmers in the group, our computer guru Jessica, immediately embraced my desire to grow grains and offered space on her few country acres.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I visited her on her small homestead, and as she tilled one 10′ x 10′ patch, I sowed another with buckwheat seed. (The second patch ended up getting a cover crop to prepare it for this fall’s planting of winter wheat.) We celebrated our endeavors with a hearty home-cooked and almost all-local meal, and capped it off with a couple of local brews.

As the weeks passed, Jessica sent me periodic photo updates of the buckwheat patch, showing its growth from a scattering of small rounded leaves to a thick, lush mini-forest of heart-shaped leaves — just tall enough to hide a small dog (seen in the top photo…barely). I visited a couple of times, but with a patch of grain, there’s really not much to do with it except watch it grow, and that loses its appeal pretty quickly.

By mid-August, though, Jessica had reported that the buckwheat had bloomed and was starting to yellow. That sounded like my cue to start harvesting.

Sure enough, the hip-high stalks held small clusters of pointed, dark brown grains that were dry enough to gather. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much of a plan on how to harvest my buckwheat, so a couple of friends and I started by rubbing the grains off in our hands and dumping those grains into a bucket. That didn’t last long. One friend had the wit to get a pair of garden clippers from his truck and cut down several stalks at a time before chafing them all together in his hands over a towel. That sped up the process, but not enough, and I was left facing a 10′ x 10′ patch that suddenly seemed much larger.

After a good deal of thinking and finally finding time in my schedule to return to the farm, I worked with Jessica to mow down the remaining stalks with my old hedge clippers: she gathered a bundle of stalks, and I chopped them off. We stopped periodically to thresh the grains, using flexible screens in large flat cardboard trays to chafe the grains off the stems. Once we had stripped the stems, we poured the seeds –- chaff and all –- into a large paper bag and continued our work.

It wasn’t easy: weeks of ignoring the patch meant that a good many of the stalks had lodged and dropped seed to the ground. (We saw plenty of new buckwheat seedlings coming up under the brush.) Bending over to gather and cut the stalks took a toll on both our backs. But after a couple hours, we had cleared the patch, threshed the grain, and kicked back for the evening.

Back at home, I spread out the grains on trays to allow them to dry a little more, mostly for the sake of drying out the leaves and other bits that had gotten caught up in the seeds. I waited for an afternoon with a good breeze, then dumped some of the buckwheat into one of my mixing bowls, grabbed another bowl, and winnowed the grain by pouring the mixture back and forth between bowls, listening to the rattle of the seeds and allowing the wind to carry away the chaff.

By the time I had finished, I ended up with about three and a half quarts of buckwheat seed stored for winter: not, perhaps, a significant yield but a satisfying start to my grain raising plans.

It didn’t take me long to test the quality of what I had grown, either. Shortly after the final harvest, I ground about two cups of the seed in my hand-cranked mill and then sifted out most of the hulls. The resulting flour had an almost golden tinge to it, surprisingly, along with the black flecks from the remaining hull pieces. And since the variety I had bought (Tartary buckwheat, Fagopyrum tataricum) was billed as being the kind used in French-Canadian crepes, I invited Jessica and a couple of other friends over for a potluck dinner that included fresh buckwheat crepes with sauteed vegetables. They unanimously agreed: the experiment was a success!

I’m looking forward to continuing the experiment in the kitchen this winter, making pancakes and breads and cookies and possibly pasta with my homegrown, hand-harvested, hand-milled buckwheat flour. I’m also looking forward to growing other grains as I take over more of Jessica’s homestead (with her delighted approval) next year.

Will those crops be as successful as the buckwheat? You guessed it: we’ll just have to wheat to find oat.

Top two photos by Jessica Barkheimer; bottom two photos by author.

It’s not surprising that Monterey is the first stop for the USDA’s leafy-greens bandwagon. If ever there were a capital of greens, this would be it: the county seat is Salinas, a region as agriculturally intensive — and even less diverse — as it was when Steinbeck wrote about it in the first half of the 20th century. The majority of California’s spinach, lettuce, chard, and other greens are grown here. (California and Arizona together produce 75% of the country’s greens, according to industry sources, and many California companies move production to Arizona during the winter months to ensure year-round supply.)

It’s also home base for the industry authors of a national National Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement [pdf] on the safety of greens such as spinach, lettuce and chard. In a nutshell: the proposal was drafted by big industry players. If the USDA allows them to flesh it out into a full-on marketing agreement, then leafy greens “handlers” — AKA wholesalers, shippers and processors — will be able to sign on as members. In exchange for carrying out certain “safe food” practices (or requiring the farmers they buy from to do so) and passing an audit, they’ll get a handy little certification seal to display. The agreement is voluntary for the companies — no one is required to sign up — but if you’re a farmer selling to a handler that signs on, you will have to comply with the practices or else find another buyer. While it appears that direct farm-to-consumer or farm-to-restaurant sales are outside the purview of the agreement, any farmer wishing to sell to wholesale or institutional markets should sit up and take notice: this could apply to you.

Witness protection program

There are four members of the industry associations, two of them lawyers, perched on the stage next to the witness stand when I enter the hearing room on Tuesday morning. The hearings are being held by USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) to decide if they want to assist the industry group in developing and implementing their proposal. The government reps are supposed to be here to neutrally accept public comment… public comment that must be offered in front of a judge and be subject to cross-examination by AMS, the industry proponent group, and anyone else in the audience.

Although the hearings are limited to a certain number of days, in most official hearings like this, the industry is allowed to call all of its witnesses before opposing views are heard. When I arrive at 8:30 Tuesday morning, the industry reps declare that they have 31 witnesses. By 11 am, we’ve gotten through two.

I need some whiskey, and it’s not even noon.

Not surprisingly, this morning it’s a love fest for the proposed NLGMA. Witnesses speak from their experiences with the California LGMA, which was developed by the same industry group after the 2006 outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 in ready-to-eat bagged spinach, and claim that participating in the California program has improved the safety of leafy greens and boosted consumer confidence in the industry. (No one mentions that since the California agreement went into effect, Salinas-based companies have had four leafy-greens recalls for Salmonella or E. coli, nor that the contamination was caught not by the companies, but by random testing by state departments of agriculture. “Effective,” indeed!) A rep from the Texas Produce Association acknowledges that small farmers will probably have a harder time meeting NLGMA requirements than the big guys but still supports it.

I sip my coffee.

The AMS marketing specialist leading the government questioning, Melissa Schmaedick, responds with a lengthy cross-examination, including questions about the role of small-scale or organic growers in the agreement. Seems positive enough; AMS also runs the National Organic Program, so presumably they should care how the NLGMA would impact those growers. (There’s no reason to think that organic producers, particularly the larger ones, would not be caught up in the proposed agreement; Earthbound Farms is already signatory to the California LGMA, so all the farmers who grow for Earthbound have to comply with its on-farm requirements.)

But it soon becomes clear that Schmaedick’s line of questioning doesn’t meet the promised standard of neutrality. She seems far less interested in understanding why complying with the agreement will be a challenge for these producers — or why a food safety program led by Big Ag might not be the best one for our diverse agricultural system — and more in getting witnesses to state, for the record, that there could be opportunities for these interests to participate in developing or commenting on the agreement before it goes into effect.

“Do you see anything in this proposal that would prohibit small or organic handlers from helping to develop the marketing agreement?” she asks again and again. The answer is always no. Somehow, I do not feel better.

And now, for a brief intermission

Picture of a "sterile" farm courtesy of Wild Farm Alliance

After lunch, the judge takes pity on the other people who have shown up to provide comments but aren’t on the proponent group’s special list. Two staff from the Environmental Protection Agency, one from US EPA and one from Cal EPA, are allowed to take the stand. Like many witnesses, they use experience from the California LGMA to predict how an NLGMA might play out — but unlike earlier witnesses, that experience has made them wary. The California agreement fingers wild animals as a significant source of E. coli risk and “recommends” that producers take steps to minimize the presence of wildlife on farms. Ever since the California agreement went into effect in 2007, say the EPA reps, more farmers have been poisoning or trapping animals that aren’t an E. coli risk, such as rodents and frogs. They’ve also been ripping out vegetation on farms that might serve as wildlife habitat and filling wetlands, at times in violation of environmental laws. Trying to out-market each other on food safety, big produce buyers have developed even more extreme “sterile farm” programs, and the California LGMA has done nothing to curb their proliferation. (See photo at right; I covered these sterile-farm programs in an earlier post here.)

But both EPA witnesses repeat the same sentence verbatim (sent down from on high, perhaps?) that they would support a national LGMA that allowed farmers to jointly manage food safety and environmental protection. Is there anything in the proposal, asks Schmaedick, that suggests that the nuts and bolts of the agreement couldn’t be written to allow that to happen? No. OK! No worries!

I am, of course, beginning to worry.

Reasons to Worry, #1: Outfoxing the feds

In the afternoon, the proponent group calls one of its own, a vice president at Western Growers named Hank Giclas. Hank was one of the core group that drafted the California LGMA and the proposal for a national agreement, so his testimony focuses on how, if AMS gives them the green light, they would go about developing the NLGMA. In between his claims that the practices required of farmers and processors (referred to as “the metrics”) would be “grounded in the best science, scaleable, and regionally flexible,” he paints a picture of an agreement that, in my opinion, is unacceptably industry-controlled. (Needless to say, he does not use those words.)

The process of fleshing out the agreement, and ultimately of implementing it, will be run by an administrative committee made up of handlers (remember, that means wholesalers, shippers and processing companies) and a handful of producers from each of five “zones” of the country. Each zone conveniently includes a major leafy-greens state whose industry association helped draft this proposal. The administrative committee would also include one retailer, one rep from a foodservice company, an importer and a “member of the public.” These committee members, interestingly enough, would be chosen by the industry members. Take-home message: all of the members of this agreement’s administrative committee will either be from industry or chosen by industry.

The administrative committee will be assisted by a technical board charged with developing the metrics, the set of practices that farmers, shippers and processors will have to follow to reduce the chances that leafy greens will get contaminated with a pathogen like E. coli. Of the 14 members of the technical board, 10 are appointed by the industry reps on the administrative committee. (Five of those ten are “produce food safety experts” and must be from land-grant universities—agricultural schools now often heavily funded by industry—since clearly other schools don’t know jack about food safety issues.) Of the remaining four seats, two constitute Schmaedick’s “opportunity” to balance food safety and environmental concerns: one rep from the EPA and one from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. The final two seats are filled by personnel from the FDA, the government agency that, unlike AMS, actually has authority over produce safety.

Take-home message: aside from four government seats, the technical committee in charge of deciding what farmers will be required to do on their farms is industry-appointed (and possibly, in the case of the academics, industry-funded). That is why, when Schmaedick suggests that everyone will have the opportunity to participate, I feel a nagging sense of doubt.

Reasons to worry #2: Cause if we couldn’t tell already, AMS has a conflict of interest

While AMS is busy deciding if Big Ag should be allowed to do its own thing with the NLGMA, Congress is focused on two bills (H.R. 2749 and S. 510) that would also govern produce safety on farms or in processing plants, but in a different way. Marketing agreements are voluntary; the regulations under consideration by Congress are, um, regulations, so they’re not voluntary. The regulations would be developed by the FDA, which governs produce safety. In contrast, AMS’s mandate as a government agency is to facilitate the marketing of U.S. agricultural products. If you were in the industry, who would you want in charge?

Well, if I can say one thing for Giclas, it is that he’s honest about the true intent of this program. At some point, while being cross-examined by a lawyer hired by the National Organic Coalition, he explicitly acknowledges that the industry is trying to propose an alternative to FDA regulation. He does not believe, he says, that FDA regulations would “put industry at the table” in the same way that the marketing agreement structure does.

No kidding.

Act three, coming soon: Drama, intrigue, and threatened lawsuits as the opponents take the stage!