With food shortages provoking riots in recent years, and the world’s population increasing

And now there’s a new development aid policy in the pipeline that may prove equally short-sighted, but also far riskier for small farmers around the world.

Officials at USAID, the agency that carries out U.S. development work abroad, have been positioning hunger as a problem of agricultural yield — poor countries just aren’t producing enough food — and promoting genetically engineered seeds as an important part of the solution. It’s an argument uncannily similar to the massive ad campaign recently mounted by Monsanto, the biotech company that controls some 90% of the global market for genetically engineered (GE) seeds. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to release a blueprint for development aid that features such seeds prominently as early as this week. It could become legislation soon after.

[July 9, 2009 update: In anticipation of this announcement, CREDO Action — the activist arm of Working Assets — is circulating a petition titled "Tell your senators Monsanto can't feed the world.]

We asked Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathologist and molecular biologist currently working for the Union of Concerned Scientists and an expert in genetic engineering (see bio), to discuss the science of GE crops and whether they are appropriate tools with which to combat world hunger. Below is the first in a two-part Q&A.

The Ethicurean: Tell us a little about your background and work on GE issues.

Doug Gurian-Sherman: From as early as I can remember, I’ve been interested in biology. I got interested in molecular biology in the ‘70s; this was the field that would become genetic engineering. New advances in molecular biology, cloning and other things, were just being developed then. I found it fascinating. So I went to grad school. I wanted to use molecular biology and genetic engineering to study ecological problems, to get a better understanding of the ecology of microorganisms that grow on plants. The lab I worked at did some of the first field tests allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency on a GE organism in the environment. I was doing classical GE work: if I changed a gene, how did it change the properties of the organism?

I did my postdoc with the USDA in one of the first labs to successfully develop GE wheat and rice. Only one other lab, I believe, had developed GE wheat at that time. From there, I ended up in the U.S. Patent Office, in the biotechnology group, examining biotech patents. Then I worked at the EPA evaluating the safety of GE organisms, among other things. So I’ve both regulated these things and developed them.

When we talk about promoting GE technology in developing countries, what crops and traits do we mean exactly?

So far, it’s the same crops and traits that are in use in the U.S.–corn , soybeans, and cotton. Two main traits have been developed. The first is insect resistance: to date they’ve used a few different genes from Bt bacteria — which are selectively toxic to some insect pests — to protect against a handful of lepidoptera, moth-like pests like the European corn borer. There are a few other GE traits used in corn in the U.S. aimed at several beetle species called rootworms, but those haven’t been used in developing countries.

The other category of GE crops are those with herbicide tolerance — like tolerance to Roundup, Monsanto’s herbicide — that allow farmers to spray herbicide onto crops without killing them. It’s convenient for the farmers because they can control weeds with minimal labor.

So how come when Monsanto and members of Congress talk about the potential of GE crops in developing countries, they talk about yield-increasing potential? Do they mean the yield increases you’d get because your plants aren’t being attacked by pests or overwhelmed by weeds?

You’re right: there’s confusion when companies talk about increasing yield.

There are two ways you can influence the yield of a plant. The first is by boosting the plant’s intrinsic yield, the yield potential provided by the genetics of the plant itself. You boost that yield by optimizing the genetic ability, and this is best observed when of the crop is growingunder favorable conditions. The second way is by boosting operational yield. These are the increases you get when you prevent losses due to pests or stresses. Losses from pests or stresses like drought can be thought of as reductions from the intrinsic yield. Bt and herbicide tolerance are this second kind — operational yield gains. In the U.S., the main type of Bt crops prevent damage from the pests corn borer and rootworm on corn, or bollworm on cotton. So whatever losses you’d get from corn borer, to the extent they’re prevented because you’re using Bt seeds, that’s operational yield gain.

There have been no GE crops yet commercialized that have provided intrinsic yield gain or yield potential. That should be contrasted with conventional breeding and enhanced ways of breeding using genomic information, both of which have increased intrinsic yield considerably. Genetic engineers have tried to do it, but they haven’t succeeded. These current crops weren’t designed to increase intrinsic yield. They’re talking about operational yield.

OK, so how effective would operational yield gains be in developing countries?

In developing countries, pests often tend to cause higher losses than they do in the US. This is often because the farmers are trying to grow the same export crop year after year or the same subsistence crop year after year. Those aren’t good agricultural practices, but farmers have been pushed into undesirable situations due to poverty.

The impact of existing GE crops on yield is really variable in developing countries. Bt cotton has been studied in developing-country settings but there’s been less study of Bt corn. Yield increases can often vary from about 10 to 40%, and sometimes more. That sounds like a lot, but usually these farmers are starting at very low yield levels, so these kinds of yield increases are usually not going to be enough to lift them out of poverty. For herbicide-tolerant crops, grown mostly in South America, studies don’t show any benefit to yield compared to other available technologies. That’s because even for conventional farmers, the herbicides they already had worked just as well as Roundup, although several different herbicides had to be used.

And how have these crops worked here in the U.S.?

In our recent report [“Failure to Yield,” PDF here and Ethicurean summary here], we looked at the public record of field trials on GE soy and corn, the two major food/feed crops in the U.S. We found that in the U.S., as I said, GE technology hasn’t increased intrinsic yields at all. Herbicide tolerance hasn’t increased operational yields either, and Bt traits have only increased operational yields a little bit, much less than other technology. Although some individual farmers can see yield increases of 10 or 12%, we found that Bt corn was responsible for only a 3 to 4% yield gain nationally since it became available 13 years ago. But over that same period of time, corn yields overall have gone up 28%. So only 14% of the total yield increase we’ve seen in corn in the U.S. is due to Bt traits. And again, none of the crops we looked at have increased intrinsic yield.

The companies have tried; we found that there have been many field trials — over 3,000 — for various types of yield improvement, including for intrinsic yield.

If these companies have been working for so long to boost intrinsic yield with GE technology, how come it’s proving so difficult?

The traits to increase intrinsic yield are much more complex than for adding Bt. For Bt, you have a gene that codes for a single protein — the Cry protein — and it directly attacks the insect. It’s genetically very simple. Herbicide tolerance is similar: you either have a gene that produces an enzyme that inactivates the herbicide when it goes into the plant, or, as in Roundup Ready seeds, you find an enzyme that’s immune to the herbicide and replace a target enzyme in the plants with that. They’re genetically simple systems.

Yet despite that, these genes have caused unintended changes in the genetics of the plants. Bt corn, for example, has increased lignin — a component of plants’ cell walls — and no one knows why. You’re not putting a gene into an empty box; it interacts with the genes that are part of the genome of the organism.

Traits for intrinsic yield and drought tolerance are much more complex and are controlled by multiple genes. Different plants use different genes under different conditions; drought tolerance comes from one combination of genes in corn, a different combination in cactii. If there are many things going on in the environment — drought stress, salinity stress, insects — the plant may have a whole other set of genes involved to help it get through this. These genes may not be the same as the ones that help it weather drought alone.

On top of that, because the genetics of this kind of GE crop are more complex, you also have more unintended effects through interactions with other genes in the plant. You can get “downstream effects” that are pretty far removed from the trait you’re intending to get. Some of those unintended effects could be harmful ecologically or in terms of human health — but they’re also harmful agriculturally.

Most of the plants we’re working with have been bred for decades to improve various qualities, including yield. With genetic engineering, you’re adding additional changes to the plant, but you could also screw something up that’s been optimized already. I suspects that what’s happening in the field trials with a lot of these crops is that they try something and then get unintended effects. They just don’t work as well as they hoped or an unintended effect interferes with some other important property of the crop, so they can’t market them.

Can you give an example of these unintended effects?

In the report we cover an interesting case. One problem with some drought-tolerant crop varieties is that under normal moisture conditions, the variety doesn’t yield as well as varieties without drought tolerance. The New York Times recently covered a potential breakthrough with a particular gene that reportedly conferred drought tolerance but didn’t show that downside. But then a few months later, another lab working on the gene for different reasons found that it made plants more susceptible to various plant diseases. So the same gene that confers drought tolerance makes plants more susceptible to disease. Farmers may have to use pesticides to control these diseases if this drought tolerance gene is approved. How will this balance out in terms of benefit and risk?

Such unintended effects are not publicized because companies don’t like to talk about failures. The bottom line is that there has been a huge amount of effort to produce a lot of crops over the years with success of only a few traits: Bt and herbicide tolerance. They have not resulted in significant yield gains at all in the U.S. And we also have to put any yield gains in the context of the expense and other factors and compare GE technology to other technologies and production methods.

Some of these genes may pan out in the future, but overall, how will GE stack up compared to other methods and technologies that have been more successful in the past, or that have the multiple benefits? GE gets undue attention in the form of media hype, research investment, and political encouragement when in fact other methods show much more promise.

Look for Part Two later this week, in which Gurian-Sherman shares the results of studies on alternative production methods in developing countries and talks about what the GE approach means for poor farmers’ livelihoods.

A film like “Dirt!” is thus quite timely.* Over the course of 90 minutes, the film follows the classic structure of environmental documentaries: exposition followed by outrage, gloom, and doom, capped with an uplifting conclusion. It alternates between archival footage, cute cartoons about dirt, and interviews with luminaries like Vandana Shiva, Nobel Laureate Wangaari Mathai, Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, and Andy Lipkis of Tree People. “Dirt!” attempts to explain humanity’s connection to dirt: how we are mistreating it, how we can restore it, and how it can restore us. This last point is illustrated by a visit to a church in Chimayo, New Mexico, where the dirt is believed to have healing powers, and to a prison in New York, where a small garden provides a place for some inmates to learn landscaping skills while also learning about self-control and gaining self-esteem.

Although it is a little short on the science of dirt and a little long on the gloom and doom (did we really need to see 10 minutes of mining explosions?), in the end the film is inspiring and made me want to work in my tiny garden, tend my composting worms, and appreciate this living thing that keeps us all alive.

Watch for screenings of this independent film in your area. And if you’re putting together a food or farming film festival, this would be a fantastic addition to the program.

*”Dirt!” should not be confused with “In Good Heart: Soil and the Mystery of Fertility,” a film by Deborah Koons Garcia that is currently in production, with a release target of Spring 2010. Over at Grist, Tom Philpott interviewed Koons Garcia about her project during Slow Food Nation in 2008.

Another round for the revolving door:

Congress is considering a major food safety bill —  more info here — and the scuttlebutt is that Taylor might coordinate the implementation of that bill once it’s passed. It’s not clear whether Taylor will be employed by the agency or will work on contract. Not that it really matters.

If ever there were a poster boy for revolving door, Taylor would be him. In the late 1980s, he left a job at the FDA to work as a lawyer and lobbyist for a company representing biotech giant Monsanto. He’s perhaps best known for his role in Monsanto’s campaign to approve rBGH, a controversial artificial growth hormone given to cows to increase milk production. Taylor sauntered over to the FDA shortly after rBGH was approved for commercial use, where he oversaw the development of guidelines for rBGH milk labeling. Or rather, saw that they were never developed: Milk from rBGH-treated cows does not have to be labeled.

Then it was on to the USDA, back to the private law firm, and over to Monsanto’s DC offices, where he worked until joining GWU. Taylor was named to Obama’s ag transition team late last year, which critics (including us) saw as a boon for the GMO lobby.

Taylor has been riding the revolving door like it’s a carousel so long that Jim Hightower’s 1994 rant about the man sounds positively present-day.

What could this mean for food safety? Perhaps the only good news is that the FDA doesn’t regulate meat; Taylor is on the record opposing government inspection of meat processing facilities. (See this La Vida Locavore post for more info.) But with his hands in FDA pie, we’re guessing that agency’s food work won’t be too safe, either. The agency will soon be considering whether and how to regulate food safety on farms, whether to require electronic tracking of food from farm to retailer, and other questions that could spell disaster for small producers and local food systems if they’re answered incorrectly.  Will Taylor push for tech-heavy fixes that bias the system towards the big guys?

Our money’s on yes.

Coming off of a weekend of non-stop planting, weeding, irrigating, harvesting, and storing, I finally reached one of those exhausting peaks where I asked myself, “Why do I do this?”

And then I looked up at my equally sweaty and exasperated husband and voiced what his eyes questioned back, “Why do we do this?”

“This” meaning working a full-time job and trying to get an organic farm up and running in the evenings and on weekends.

I am often quick to placate my self-questioning. When my back is stridently sore from bending over 100-foot-long rows, I think, “Farmworkers in Florida do this for 10 to 12 hours a day. Bend in solidarity with your brothers and sisters.”

When the pea pods just keep coming, I think, “You dream of this in January when you order pounds of Sugar Ann Snap Peas. Suck it up.”

Then when the mighty pugilist purslane decides to nominate itself again as my arch nemesis, I have thoughts of burning the field. Yes, you can defeat purslane by eating it, as the Ethicurean’s Jennifer recomends sagely — this “weed” is reported to have more Omega-3 fatty acids than any other leafy vegetable plant. And I haven’t paid a cent in seed so I should harvest and enjoy this ubiquitous crop. But I can’t. My taste buds refuse to appreciate this creeping, suffocating weed. Or maybe I haven’t been able to forgive it for choking out my edamame, fennel, or other seeds in the past that fought and failed against its unforgiving taproot.

But it’s not fair to put the blame on purslane. It’s just the nature of small-scale agriculture and being a beginning grower. We make mistakes. We get tired. We get frustrated, really frustrated. We question our systems.

And then, we get lucky, or just do everything good enough that the crop flourishes. We harvest at the peak flavor and nutritional value, and get the goods to the mouths that water at the thought of a fresh succulent Aunt Ruby German Green tomato.

Those mouths include my own — you know, the complaining one. I taste the stir fry of ingredients that were living in the soil just moments before: carrots, onions, garlic, chard, snow peas, and our own pork (once named Petunia). Then dessert: foraged wild raspberries we picked and preserved that day.

This is not a five-star restaurant. It’s better, so much better. Words can’t describe.

I know this food, real food, was nurtured. No pesticides or chemicals applied here. The seeds are organic; the soil replenished last year with a cover crop. The fruits were harvested with care and stored to save the full value of the food. The distance traveled from field to fork is about as far as I can throw an heirloom tomato.

So as we dine with dirt in every pore from a hard day’s work, the smile returns.

Why do we do this? Because we love it.

In 1945, during the fourth year of America’s direct involvement in World War II, President Harry Truman issued a proclamation about food. He called for those on the home front to plant larger victory gardens, to preserve more food, and to minimize food waste. This proclamation came after years of propaganda about growing a Victory Garden, the operation of community canning centers across the country, rationing of premium foods, and other wartime policies, and so I’m guessing that it was taken in stride by the Home Front population.

Poster from the Office of War Information, 1943

Since running across the proclamation, I have been wondering if a similar announcement from our current president would be useful. While we aren’t facing something as immediately dire as a world war, some daunting challenges could be addressed with better food policy — the economic crisis, peak oil, climate chaos, wave after wave of food-safety crises, lives destroyed by diet-related maladies like diabetes and heart disease, to name a few. The recommendations would necessarily be different, perhaps with a items about trying to cooking at home more, or choosing unprocessed foods.

After some thought — and a lot of exposure to mass media — I don’t see that much would be gained by a proclamation. In these days of 24-hour cable channels, blogs, Twitter, and the like, it might garner a tiny box in the “National News” section of the newspaper, five seconds on CNN, or a few Tweets, and then disappear into the federal archives.

First Lady Michelle Obama in the White House garden

Even more likely, it would be overshadowed by continuing coverage of the White House Kitchen Garden (WHKG), part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “brilliant end run” to shape the nation’s food policy. The garden is an amazing publicity machine, appearing in every conceivable form of media (with Obama Foodorama doing a lot of original reporting as well as deconstructing other coverage), and giving the Obamas an opportunity to make food and agriculture part of the mainstream national conversation.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it also looks like one high-profile,  determined advocate is worth a thousand proclamations or propaganda posters. Michelle Obama’s lively personality, understanding of the issues, and experience with a personal challenge that many can relate to — raising healthy children in an unhealthy culture — humanizes the often abstract world of food policy.

Images from the University of North Texas digital collections.; Michelle Obama photo from America.gov.

Want hormones out of kid’s milk? Pesticides off the tomatoes? Local lettuce in the salad bar? Candy bars and snack cakes to be considered junk food? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then I urge you to step into the lunch room and learn what this food fight is all about.

What our kids see on their lunch trays is a snapshot of our national food system: fresh, baked, breaded, or fried. What we feed them affects how they learn, how they grow, and what kind of future citizens we’re nurturing. A formidable new combatant has just joined the kid-food fray: our country’s Mom-in-Chief. Last Tuesday, First Lady Michelle Obama stepped up her support of local, fresh foods, invoking community gardens and the Child Nutrition Act, while enjoying a harvest picnic with the Bancroft fifth-graders. (Read or watch Michelle Obama’s speech.)

The current Child Nutrition Act expires September 30, 2009, meaning it’s up for reauthorization, and in that process we have a chance to really improve on how food for our smallest citizens is funded, sourced, defined, and prioritized. Remember in 1981, how under Reaganomics ketchup was classified as a vegetable and 2 million children were dropped from the National School Lunch Program? The Act has far-reaching impact, beyond school lunch, to the WIC, Child and Adult Care Food, and Summer Food Service programs, and others.

During the last reauthorization cycle five years ago, there was a scarcity of grassroots pressure and media around this policy. Thankfully, times have changed. There is a bountiful buffet of campaigns you can participate in: you can take five seconds and sign your name to a petition to demonstrate support, or you can dedicate your life to the cause like the indefatigable Ann Cooper (aka the Renegade Lunch Lady). Or you can grab a tray and get in line on one of the following efforts.

Today, the Healthy School Food Brigade (PDF), comprised mostly of moms, marched the halls of Congress to, you guessed it, voice their support of healthy food choices in schools, from hot lunches to less junk-filled vending machines. Basically they want to get junk food out of schools. Sounds simple, but au contraire. Think water is better than high-fructose-corn-syrup-laced fruit juice? Take this quiz to see what the standards for “healthy” currently are.

This group is specifically advocating for HR 1324 and S.934: “Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act of 2009,” which amends the Child Nutrition Act to require the Secretary of Agriculture to establish science-based nutrition standards for foods served in schools other than foods served under the school lunch or breakfast programs. Today’s day of lobbying is the culmination of the new film Food Inc.’s social-action campaign, organized by Participant Media for the Child Nutrition Reauthorization. They joined forces with the Center for Science in the Public Interest in advocating for the proposed bill.

Food, Inc.’s campaign doesn’t stop at the end of the brigade today. Turn on your computer’s sound and take a noisy wander through the Hungry for Change cafeteria, which links to various organizations’ child-nutrition-focused campaigns. Among them:

• Food & Water Watch is working to get rBGH out of school milk and stopping the practice of irradiation to kill bacteria
• Pesticide Action Network pushing for decreasing pesticide use on the food, particularly endosulfan
• Center for Science in the Public Interest standing up for nutrition standards
• One Tray, a collaborative campaign to rebalance the way American children eat in school by restoring the connection between children, food, land, and place. Representing the Farm to School programs, One Tray’s premise is that school food can not only improve the health of kids, but it can also offer new marketing opportunities for farmers and support the local economy. A joint project of the Community Food Security Coalition, National Farm to School Network, and School Food FOCUS, One Tray will officially launch when it’s time to take Congress “Back to School” in the fall.

The 2004 Child Nutrition Act included one provision on Farm to School (section 122): a seed grant program with $10 million in discretionary funding. It has failed to receive an appropriation. One Tray requests that Congress enact $50 million in mandatory funding for section 122. This would fund 100 to 500 projects per year, up to $100,000 each, to cover start-up costs for Farm to School programs.

Also in support of Farm to School, Slow Food USA launched a Time for Lunch campaign yesterday, to organize a national day of action on September 7 with grassroots Eat-Ins around the country, reminiscent of their monumentally successful event in San Francisco last year. Their message is simple: Real food in schools. Check out their top-notch organizing tools to plan or join an Eat-In.

These are all relatively new campaigns. The Child Nutrition Forum is the lunch monitor of this policy push. Formed in the late 1970s by former Senator George McGovern (D-S.D.), the CNF is co-led by the School Nutrition Association (which has a set of amazing, frequently updated resources) and the Food Research and Action Center, and includes more than several hundred diverse organizations, such as the American Dietetic Association, Congressional Hunger Center, National PTA, and the National Education Association. They have a petition to sign, too.

Petitions, eat-in’s, brigades…so many choices of ways to help improve our future. What are you going to do?

Ethicurean contributor Debra Eschmeyer is the media and marketing manager of the National Farm to School Network and the Center for Food & Justice, Occidental College. A Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow, she farms in Ohio.

By Renee Ciulla

Although many days I would prefer to just pick up a shovel and start farming, I am forging ahead with a Master of Science degree in Agroecology.

I am currently studying for a year in Germany, and the more I learn about organic farming and local-food initiatives, the more I see how they can ameliorate some of the problems associated with our global food system. I hope that by learning more about the factors related to ethical and environmental food production, I can ultimately inspire others to feel proud about the food they swallow. I would highly recommend that anyone interested in organic or biodynamic farming, renewable energy; soil biology; plant nutrition; organic food quality, processing and marketing check out the International Organic Agriculture program at the University of Kassel, where I am.

Seeds of a passion

Raised on America’s East Coast in rural New Hampshire, I’ve always been intrigued by farmers and the idea of living off the land. I can remember visiting the Amish communities of Pennsylvania as a 6-year-old and knowing immediately that this was the life for me. Despite these instincts, I have since joined the fast-paced, car-cruising, cyber-connected world, but I do manage to keep my hands in the dirt as much as possible.

After getting my undergraduate degree  (BS in Environmental Studies, Geology and Psychology) from Saint Lawrence University in Canton, NY, I helped manage an organic fast-food restaurant and tried my hand at landscaping for two years in Portsmouth, NH. During this time I couldn’t shake my constant thoughts about our twisted, backward global-food system.

“Would it be possible for more people to sustain themselves on a local food system?” I kept wondering. I started to realize, like many other Americans, that “certified organic” isn’t always the golden environmental answer, especially when it involved New Englanders eating California lettuce and crispy New Zealand apples in January, while New Hampshire apple trees were laden with their own fruit. With these thoughts painting the backdrop of my mind, I moved out West to the Rocky Mountains of Bozeman, MT, where I started my own business creating home vegetable and herb gardens for residential families and teaching people to grow their own food. Surprisingly, my customers were very receptive to these ideas: before long there was a waiting list of people eager to grow their own salad greens, zucchini, and tomatoes. During my two years in Montana, I was also able to work on an organic farm, where I grew peas and beans for the local co-op and  managed the farm greenhouse, and to comanaged a health food store that actively supported local farmers.

In the fall of 2006 I traveled to Italy for three months to work on organic farms, and when I returned to the U.S., I decided I wanted to go back to school and learn as much as possible about organic farming and food systems in a more structured environment. After applying to several American and European graduate schools, I decided on a two-year Master of Science degree in Agroecology, based in Norway at the University of Life Sciences in Aas.

Magical kingdom

The Organic Agriculture Department building

My first few days in Witzenhausen, Germany as an exchange student at the University of Kassel’s International Organic Agriculture program kept bringing memories into my head about childhood fairy tales. The perfectly painted half-timbered homes, meticulously groomed trails through surrounding thick, mystical forests, and castles dotting the rolling farmland outside the town create an enchanting experience. Set in the Werra River Valley in central Germany, Witzenhausen is the smallest university town in the country. This means that after a few weeks you can’t leave your room without seeing someone you know, and it seems to have resulted in a close-knit community of very friendly, down-to-earth people.

A bike path in Witzen

The rolling farmland surrounding the University is full of cherry trees that blossomed into brilliant white flowers in early April and have now become loaded with delectable deep red bursts of sweet cherries. I’m looking forward to helping some local farms harvest cherries in late June, but until then I’m distracted by the dozens of incredible types of sourdough wholegrain breads from the small bakeries throughout town. There’s a plethora of organic food in all the supermarkets, a wonderful health food store, many community garden plots, a large student garden and a weekly farmers market. There are also several local, organic farms producing honey, meat, vegetables, grain, dairy, berries and fruit where it is easy to grab a shovel, get dirty and attempt the tongue-twisting German language.

Student windmills

One of my favorite things about this program is the diversity of “organic themes” offered through the 23 different academic faculties. The departments include Soil Biology & Plant Nutrition, Organic Farming & Cropping Systems, Ecological Plant Protection, Agricultural Engineering, Biodynamic Agriculture, Economics & Agricultural Policy, and Organic Food Quality & Food Culture.

Solar herb dryer

Although I hadn’t planned on studying renewable energy here, once I visited the outdoor lab for Agricultural Engineering and saw the student windmills (which generate some of the electricity for the university), solar distillation and solar herb-drying experiments and several of the solar panels being utilized, I was intrigued to try following a German course in this subject. (The program is taught entirely in English, students always have the option to join the German-taught courses as well.) Classes are generally small and professors are easy to approach with research ideas or questions such as how to bike to a nearby farm for a weekend festival.

Student garden

Those interested in a career in international agricultural work will find this program particularly fitting because it brings you in contact with students from every corner of the globe. Much of the research is being conducted in tropical and subtropical areas as well as arid regions such as Africa. There is a tropical greenhouse on campus as well as a research farm located near Kassel, where students are welcome to visit and contribute to ongoing projects, such as the integration of nature conservation and organic farming (increasing local varieties, field feed for birds, rehabilitating the river system), the optimization of organic cultivation of potatoes for processing, alternative soil management systems in organic farming and intercropping of cereals and grain legumes for increased production, weed control, improved product quality, and prevention of nitrogen losses. Furthermore, professors have contacts with countless numbers of influential international agricultural organizations (such as the FAO in Rome and FiBL in Switzerland) and countless other universities in Europe. The worldwide umbrella organization for organic farming, the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM), is located in Western Germany, and BioFach (the largest annual World Organic Trade Fair and lectures) takes place in Southern Germany.

As I continue my exploration into the complexities and dramas of our planet’s food supply, I hope someday I can teach others about the importance of sustainably managing our soil, growing food for themselves and others, and eating as local and organic as possible. Please feel free to contact me with any questions regarding studying in Witzenhausen or general European organic agriculture inquiries (especially related to Italy).

I walked out of the screening of “The End of the Line” feeling deeply uneasy. Most of my discomfort had been carefully orchestrated by the film’s director, Rupert Murray, who filled the 80 minutes with straight-talking scientists and image upon image of wild fish being violently removed from the ocean.

Fishermen stabbed endangered bluefin tuna (left) in roiling pools of bloodied water. Giant trawl nets scraped across the ocean’s bottom, decimating coral and seaweed in its wake, leaving pounds of wasted sea life to be tossed back over the side of the boat. Then there was the sheer number of industrial-size factory vessels, crawling ominously over the surface of the ocean with their highly precise tracking systems, often blatant disregard for quotas, and the ability to catch several times the number of fish remaining in the ocean below them.

Like with all good hard-hitting Big Issue documentaries, “The End of the Line” closed with a classic what-you-can-do list. On a policy level, we were asked to put pressure on governments to create more marine reserve areas and to push for better enforcement of fishing quotas, among other suggestions. The filmmakers implored us as individuals to eat only wild fish from sustainable fisheries and to switch from large, carnivorous fish such as salmon and tuna to smaller species lower on the food chain.

None of these recommendations will come as a surprise if you’ve seen the film — or read about the issue recently — and they’re all worthwhile. But I left “The End of the Line” with a feeling not unlike the one I had at the end of “An Inconvenient Truth,” when I was told that riding my bike more often and switching to compact florescent light bulbs would somehow keep the glaciers from melting like butter.

A full 90 percent of the big fish are gone, the movie reminds us. Three-quarters of the world’s fisheries are now said to be either fully exploited or over-fished. The shift to aquaculture hasn’t ultimately meant less demand for wild seafood, but often more demand, in the form of feed for carnivorous fish. Eating fish from the remaining 7% of the ocean that has been certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. But how on earth, I wondered, can that be good enough?

Why was there absolutely no mention of eating less?

One reason might have to do with today’s scientific community and their approach to quantity. So far, it seems more like an absence of an approach. According to Jennifer Jacquet, a PhD candidate at the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, and blogger for Shifting Baselines, many in the fisheries world are currently arguing for seafood consumption targets similar to greenhouse gas emission targets.

“If we can model global climate, we can certainly come up with estimates for seafood consumption what would be ideally sustainable,” she told me by phone this week.

But the lack of a clear target isn’t the only issue here. Like most industries, the fishing industry has become increasingly industrialized and monolithic. And, let’s face it, any suggestion that consumers should eat — or rather, buy — less is not a possibility they’d like to see floated.

What does it really mean to eat less seafood? On the surface, our per-capita consumption rates of actual fish and shellfish meat in the U.S. are only moderately high (around 16 pounds a year). But, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service, there’s another type of indirect consumption behind that number. The “total per capita use” of all edible and industrial fishery products, which we can assume includes wild fish that is very likely fed to farmed fish and made into fish meal used in industrial agriculture to speed up the animal’s growth. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), that number was a whopping 69.1 pounds per person a year in 2006 (PDF). You can bet it’s only increased.

So, there’s a way that eating lower on the food chain is a form of eating less. On the other hand, many of the small, pelagic (open ocean) fish are being caught in parts of the developing world where local populations rely on them for primary nutrition. Clearly, a fisherman taking a pound of anchovies from say, Peru, to feed his family directly is definitely an improvement over a trawler taking 6 pounds of anchovies to feed a salmon that we will later eat one pound of…but it’s hard not to wonder if this shift is enough.

And it’s inherently troubling that the word less would be so absent from the larger conversation.

Jacquet, who has made public statements about her decision to stop eating seafood and argues that a movement to abstain might be a valuable way to widen the debate, says she’s been uninvited from several conferences and events in recent years. “One of my colleagues told me that I wouldn’t be welcomed at the table if I wasn’t interested in eating seafood. The fact that I study the ocean and am interested in it for other reasons wasn’t enough. I found that very telling,” she says.

There’s now a great deal of science to support the fact that eating less meat is better for the environment, Jacquet adds. “Everyone from the United Nations to Cornell University has made that argument. We’re really behind [on such thinking] in the oceans.” The need to connect the seafood industry (which uses an enormous amount of fuel) to climate change is another important piece of the puzzle, she believes. “The lifecycle analysis of seafood is just amazing,” she says. “We’re transporting salmon from Chile to Norway or from Thailand to New York, every day.”

At the heart of the problem may be a familiar type of disconnection. For as long as we view fish as a commodity, and not also as wildlife, we’ll see the possibility of eating less simply as a form of rejection, rather than as a deeper level of engagement.

“If we went to the store and I wanted you to match up the filets to the heads of the fish from which they were cut, I bet you couldn’t do it,” says Jacquet. “In fact, Iprobably couldn’t do it! We’re that far removed.”

“The End of the Line” concludes with a clear, inspiring vision of the future: one of the film’s scientists describes the feasibility of a series of new, vastly expanded marine protected areas. (Today, only 1 percent of the oceans are closed to fishing vessels.) Such areas, he explains, can be created at less of a cost than we currently spend globally on subsidies for the seafood industries. Since seeing the film, the possibility of thriving oceans once again full of wild fish of all colors and sizes seems ever more compelling. With that image in my mind, giving up most seafood — seeing it as a rare treat, as Mark Bittman wrote recently in the New York Times — until then doesn’t felt like much of a sacrifice.

More

• Visit Fish or Cut Bait (takes the Monterey Seafood watch list a step further)
• This chart, linked to on Grist recently, synthesized the environmental and health impacts of many standard seafood choices in an easy visual way
• Sign the End of the Line Pledge

Raised on a small organic farm in Hawaii, Twilight Greenaway has a BA in journalism from Antioch College and an MFA from Warren Wilson. Her food politics pieces have appeared in  Culinate, Edible San Francisco, Meatpaper, and Common Ground. She writes and produces the weekly e-newsletter of the Center for Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture.

But recently, I discovered a list of workshops available at the George Jones Memorial Farm in Oberlin, OH — only an hour away — and decided to head there for an introduction to permaculture. I’ve wanted to learn about permaculture for a while but haven’t been able to find the time (or enthusiasm) to read a thick tome about it.

Healing the land, year by year

The Jones Farm itself is just the beginning, only the visible spectrum of activity on this 70-acre parcel of land. A motley collection of fields, greenhouses, compost piles, garden, straw-bale buildings, and wetlands sprawls over what was until 2001 a broad monocultural swath of pesticide-sprayed corn and soybeans. Over the years, organic practices and hard-working people (including students from nearby Oberlin College) gradually restored a varied ecology to the area, establishing the wetlands in the lower parts of the property and building up the soil in others for a current total of five acres of richly fertile farmland now in use.

Behind the scenes and located in the passive-solar straw-bale office building (shown above), the New Agrarian Center (NAC) coordinates efforts in the broader community. The NAC manages the farm and cooperates with Oberlin College to bring food-prep waste from the college’s kitchens out to the farm for compost. During the academic year, the college purchases produce from the farm, completing and enhancing the cycle year after year. During the summer, the produce harvested at the farm is sold not only at the local farmers market but also through a program called City Fresh, established to bring good fresh food into various nutrionally disadvantaged neighborhoods in Cleveland, Lorain, and Elyria, where local grocery stores and fresh produce are rarely found. The people working with City Fresh, recruited from these same neighborhoods, have established a handful of community gardens that have brought new life and hope to their neighbors, as well as excellent fruits and vegetables.

The farm, then, is a busy place, and on the day I arrived for my workshop, the whole joint was jumping with educational activities: a composting workshop led by Evelyn Bryant, head of education for the NAC, and a cob-oven-building workshop under the direction of Chris Fox, a green builder who used to work at the farm. Brad Masi, executive director of the NAC, gathered all the participants in the learning garden (a model of permaculture practices) at the start of the day to share information about the farm, the events, and each other.

After this introduction, Masi took our permaculture group into the main building for a shady, breezy, relaxing setting for our course. He explained that permaculture is a design framework for functional, complex, ecologically sustainable spaces that can be applied at different scales in different climates. While I had understood permaculture to be a blending of “permanent agriculture” and “permanent culture,” I hadn’t really grasped the implications of “culture” until Masi pointed out that permaculture goes beyond what is done in the garden. It includes shelter, energy, and people working together in community, and it follows natural designs and processes.

Once he had laid out the basic principles, such as valuing the resources around you and having every aspect of the framework serve multiple purposes to create an interdependent network, Masi took us on a tour of the farm to demonstrate ways they had incorporated these principles.

Cultivating an ecosystem

The office building served as the first example. Built with natural materials, it reduced building and energy costs. It created a micro-climate on the north side for some plantings in the learning garden, allowed for the harvesting of rainwater (a source for future irrigation), and the whole thing could be recycled (composted, really) at the end of its lifespan. The composting practices on site offered another example, as they allowed for the recycling of food scraps into rich soil and, by moving compost close to where it is needed, less work is needed to use this resource, and the soil beneath it becomes more fertile as well, allowing for expanded field space once the pile is gone.

Other intriguing examples of the permaculture principles at work on the Jones Farm include:

• a straw-bale-ended greenhouse (above) that retains heat in winter, and is currently in use as a hothouse for tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants
• a straw-bale walk-in cooler used for storing CSA produce after harvest — the structure needs only a window air-conditioning unit to keep food cool enough to be safe
• additional material for composting (brewing mash) and mulching (cinnamon sticks) comes from the Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland
• an outdoor composting toilet that provides compost for flowers after a year’s worth of “aging”
• burned beams from a recent barn fire on the farm, recycled into raised beds for carrots (shown here)
• intercropping in the fields, allowing some vegetables to be shaded or nourished by others and making the most efficient use of available sunshine

Even the relationships the farm has made with organizations such as Oberlin College and the Great Lakes Brewing Company testify to the principles in place at the farm. Because, as Masi noted, “You can’t design a farm without designing the community around it.”

In the afternoon, Masi offered the permaculture students a chance to learn a smaller-scale version of the principles in practice in his own backyard, showing how he is working to develop more of a wetland by expanding his pond and to create more edge spaces for added diversity of both flora and fauna. His small herb spiral, echoing the one in the center of the Jones Farm’s learning garden, condenses twenty-five feet of bed space in a six-foot diameter area, and the design creates a different micro-climate for the lower part of the spiral, part shaded and part warmed by the rocks. (He has even noticed a few toads taking up residence between the stones: a built-in wildlife habitat!) And he put us to work sheet-mulching a new keyhole garden bed, using cardboard, wood mulch, compost, brewery mash, and leaf mulch layered onto the space to build a rich no-till garden.

While we could hardly cover all there is to know about permaculture in one day — their upcoming certification course spans nearly two weeks — the workshop gave me enough of an introduction to the principles of permaculture to provide an “a-ha!” moment of understanding more of the bigger picture. There’s so much more to the concept than I had realized before, and having seen the example of the Jones Farm, I’m looking forward to learning more and gradually incorporating some of the principles into my own growing — and living — practices.

More:

Bill Mollison’s “Introduction to Permaculture” is a great starting point, as is “Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture” by Toby Hemenway. Friend o’ Ethicurean Severine has a lengthy book list of more permaculture and permaculture-related titles here.

Officially open as of June 14, Heartland Harvest Garden is a feast for the eyes as well as the appetite. Comprising 12 acres of edible landscape, which garden officials claim make it the biggest such garden in the country, the Heartland Harvest Garden has numerous spaces both educational and beautiful: home-style kitchen gardens, fruit and vegetable parterres with designs based on quilt patterns, a vineyard, fruit-tree plazas, and the children’s Fun Food Farm.

The “Missouri barn” will house an interpretive center; “Fresh: A Garden Café,” which will use produce from the garden; and a silo/overlook of the parterres inspired by the gardens at the French chateau, Villandry. Although visitors aren’t supposed to eat the landscape as they browse, “tasting stations” offer bites of what’s ripe.

The biggest disappointment from my recent visit was simply that the garden wasn’t entirely ready. Any garden is inevitably a work in progress, but the silo overlook and the Fresh café weren’t yet open (and, yes, I was visiting for the food!); there was no interpretative guide or map to the edible gardens (yet, anyway); and the children’s area was far from complete. I wanted to see the berry-bush maze in action!

Still, I learned a lot. Particularly appealing are the garden’s identification labels: Not only is virtually every plant labeled, but the labels include comments about the plant’s use.

Powell Gardens brought in two big-name authors to design gardens. Rosalind Creasy, an early edible garden promoter, designed one, and Barbara Damrosch (in green, at right), Washington Post columnist and author of “The Garden Primer,” created another. Creasy’s books include “The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping,” published in 1982, and most recently, “Recipes from the Garden.” This spring’s cool, damp weather has put their gardens behind where we might expect them to be at this late date, but it’s still valuable to see what the pros do.

So far I’ve been unable to confirm whether the entire Heartland Harvest garden is being grown with organic methods, although Damrosch, who was on hand Sunday, said her garden there was organic.

My visit left me with a couple of impressions regarding growing food:

• Container gardening can mean far more than a patio tomato in a plastic pot, which is how I’ve tended to regard it. The garden is awash in large, beautiful containers filled with a variety of edible plants. Now, I admit I’m curious as to how well some of these will do when, for instance, vines get big and herbs bolt. But even if they become unwieldy, it’s clear that if you have only a tiny spot in the sun (such as my back porch) you can still grow something both ornamental and good to eat.
• There are many ways to go vertical when gardening in a confined space. Besides trellises, simple wire fences can be used to carry the load of squash, beans, tomatoes and other vining food plants, at least if you choose the right varieties.
• Inclusion of edible flowers, from nasturtiums to roses and many more, adds gorgeous splashes of color.

I’ll be very interested to see how the gardens fare as summer’s heat sets in. For those not from this part of the world, let me tell you that the weather can and does assault crops here in all sorts of ways. Will those potted plants need five-times-a-day watering? Will heat radiating off the paving fry the herbs?

And if the plants do survive, even thrive, will climbing tomatoes fall down when laden with fruit? Will pests beset the squash and melon vines? I guess I’ll have to go back and find out.

More:

For an overview of the Heartland Harvest Garden, check out Jill Silva’s story in the Kansas City Star or the Powell Gardens web site’s Garden Fest page (which you might not think to look at).