If you believe, like we do, that there are lots of important
questions -- important enough that they deserve meaningful attention
-- that go into growing food and bringing it to the table, and that
the cheapest way (with or without any set of rules like those of the
National Organic Standards Board) isn't automatically and always the
best way (subjects we've previously discussed in more detail here
and here),
then you may have come to the same conclusion we have: that real
power to make meaningful choices in these questions comes by
connecting much more closely to the source of your food. And in
that case, if you've considered all the different parts of your
diet, you've probably found a very substantial list of food
categories for which there just aren't any real options for sale
anywhere in our broader area. In other words, if you live in this
area (or pretty much any other area in the industrialized world),
there are lots of foods/food categories you just can't buy except
from the supermarket system of agriculture. Obviously some foods,
like tropical fruits or new foods like margarine are by their very
nature not foods one should expect to be able to source from local
farms, but our list below is a list of foods that,
although challenging and complicated in various ways, we're fully
able to grow for our own use, foods which also were mostly commonly
available from local sources until just the last couple
generations. So, first the list of 9 things we're able to grow to
the full extent of our own family's needs but which can't be bought
from any comparable local-organic sources:
1. Buckwheat (particularly in contrast to rice...)
2. Dry peas/beans
3. Cow's milk, yogurt, butter, ice cream, mozzarella...
4. Goat's milk cheese and goat's milk (and goat meat)
5. A full assortment of local-organic fruits
6. Bread (and pancakes, biscuits, cakes, pasta, pizza, etc.)
7. Pork (and lard, bacon, ham...)
8. Nuts (so far: peanuts, black walnuts, chestnuts, and American hazelnuts, besides pecans we get from friends)
9. Corn tortillas
This would get too lengthy for our newsletter if we gave even a
brief explanation of each category on our list, but there are lots
of details to consider. If you have questions about why we say none
of these things is available to purchase from local-organic sources,
please talk to us about it further, but we'll summarize by saying
that those items which are available locally mostly either involve
substantial organic compromises (especially with animals raised on
non-local, non-organic feeds and often conventionally medicated as
well) or aren't complete enough that we would consider them full
substitutes (as with the limited supply of local-organic fruits and
nuts.) We'd also note that we're attempting with our new-this-year
Full Farm CSA plan to offer some of the above products to our Full
Farm CSA members, but our point is that even though these foods can
be grown, none of them is actually being grown for sale to the
general public.
We place buckwheat at the top of our list because, although for
most people and for us as well it's not a major staple, it played a
leading role in motivating us to more carefully consider the whole
range of foods that we had previously contented ourselves to buy
from more convenient sources. A few years ago we had decided that
if we were going to buy any foods from the supermarket system of
agriculture that we would at least buy USDA organic, but when we
ordered a bulk bag of organic buckwheat our bag of USDA organic
buckwheat came labeled "Product of China." For a number of fairly
obvious reasons this made it clear to us that the challenges and
costs of growing crops like buckwheat, dry beans and peas, a full
assortment of grain crops, the feed for our animals... were worth
taking on, and for the first time last year, although we failed to
harvest as much as we hoped, we did harvest enough buckwheat to meet
all our own family's needs. We hope to learn from some of last
year's failures and harvest enough to supply all our Full Farm CSA
members this year, but in any case, buckwheat represents many of the
common grains and grain products (rice, oatmeal, boxed breakfast
cereals...) that as a category are simply left out of the whole
local-organic food movement.
We'd like you all to especially consider that while things like
buckwheat and tortillas and the wheat that goes into making bread
and the feed that goes into making pork... are things that are easy
to overlook when there are lots of exciting local foods to focus on
instead, the crops on the list above (and their conventional
counterparts) represent a huge part, probably a majority, of
the calories we consume and the acreage of farmland we use by
proxy. They certainly represent a majority, probably a very heavy majority, of what practically everyone in the industrialized world eats (regardless of diet preferences) if you add in the foods that our
family would like to grow for ourselves but so far haven't yet fully
managed, things (and more common counterparts) we've mostly either
done without or continued to buy from the supermarket system: very substantial amounts of feed for our poultry and eggs, salad
oil, cider, beer, soy sauce, millet, oats, mustard seed, fermented
sausages like salami, hard cheese...) [2017 update: we're now growing a full supply for our family of oats and mustard seed, still working to varying degrees on most of the others, except still basically just dreaming about fermented sausages.] In other words, even a
local-food-super-hero consumer with unlimited time and money still
couldn't eat even half of any kind of normal diet from local-organic
sources, particularly not counting by calories or by one's farm
acreage footprint. We also don't see that any notable changes are
likely to be made with any of the categories on our list above in
the foreseeable future.
As farmers that likely think about these issues more and
understand them more deeply than most of our customers this leads us
to think that if we can't do more than the local food movement is
currently doing and get beyond the trajectory that the local food
movement is currently on and find some realistic hope of tackling the bulk of our diet and the bulk of our farming footprint -- gradually and with time but with some kind of reasonable plan for accomplishing more than minor token changes -- then we
might as well give up now. And that's what a lot of farmers do when
they content themselves with selling just profitable niche foods to rich people -- things that make a plate or a menu look good and feel local but that replace very few conventional calories or acres -- or when they resign themselves to quit
farming for a living and just grow what they can for themselves.
But we really want to find hope in a real alternative; we just think
hope depends on a deepening of cooperation between farmers and
consumers. If we can grow for our family and eat the foods on the
above list, even if it's not feasible to sell them to the general
public, we (and other small farmers that would eat a full spectrum
of the same kind of food they would grow) should be able to find
ways to grow a pretty full diet for those customers that share our
values enough to want to cooperate deeply with us and let our way of
farming re-define how they eat in the same way it has defined what
our family eats and our agricultural footprint. Increasingly this
goal is the focus of what we're growing and how we're selling.
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