Feed the World... One Porch, Balcony or Rooftop at a Time

The so-called “Green Revolution” of the latter half of the 20th century, in which yield-per-acre in industrial agriculture increased by orders of magnitude due to the use of improved technology and intensive fertilization, coupled with the use of herbicides to reduce weed competition and pesticides (including genetic modifications in crops to allow them to produce their own pesticides) to reduce insect depredation, all in the name of improving crop yields in order to “feed a starving world”… it’s all based on a lie.

There is a fundamental problem with the idea that we can increase food production to match population growth,

Most of the world's extreme food security issues are in Africa....

and it is an obvious problem, one which a simple look at two graphs can tell you is at the core of a whole host of global ills – first, a chart of who experiences the most food stress, and next a chart of who imports the most food.

Yes, the amount of food being produced is now greater than it ever has been before, that much is true.  But even before you begin to calculate the nearly incalculable damage that these methods have done (and are continuing to do) to our environment, we really ought to face the fundamental fact that all that extra food is going directly to wealthy people and making them fat.  Virtually none of that extra production is feeding the people who are actually dealing with food security issues.

Virtually none of the world's chief food importers overlap
with food security issues

Between 1961 and 1999, food exports globally increased by over 400%; much of that increase has come in the form of diets becoming westernized in most of Asia – the fastest growing businesses in the Pacific Rim are franchised fast food restaurants like Domino’s and McDonald’s, which to their credit do a fairly good job of localizing their menus in their new locations, but… an island nation like Indonesia is not exactly a great place to grow wheat.  As a consequence, all that flour for all those hamburger buns and pizza crusts comes from somewhere else.

The same dynamic is playing out in pretty much every country on earth where trends toward modernization and urbanization are drawing people out of the countryside and into cities that are increasingly homogenous in form and function.

There is a temptation to say, well, it’s working in Asia, and if you look at the map of underfed persons, Africa seems to be the only real problem child, so let’s just export Big Macs to Ethiopia and presto!  Problem solved!

Apart from the fact that Ethiopian Big Macs would need to be halāl (Arabic “حلال‎ “ or English “permissible”), and producing that much halāl meat is not really possible using modern factory-farming methods (animal cruelty is harām – “forbidden” – in Islam, so if the cow came from a slaughterhouse, a Muslim cannot eat it), there is also the very real problem that cattle production on the kind of scale necessary to let everyone in the world eat beef with the same wanton, hedonistic abandon as Americans do would require the use of more freshwater than the world has available.  Raising more cattle in Ethiopia than is done at present would leave no fresh water for other purposes.  It simply isn’t an option.

Even as an export… the only places in the world with sufficient freshwater for an increase in cattle production are not amenable to the industry – Lake Baikal in Siberia has 20% of the world’s freshwater.  It is also so remote and cold that unless you are either Siberian or Mongolian (or a geography geek), you’ve undoubtedly never heard of it.

The current model of feeding the world, in short, is haphazard and doesn’t work.  Numerous organizations recognize this problem and are leading efforts to reconceptualize how we approach issues of food security.  The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has over the years evolved a framework for discussing food security, and their work has been adapted by many other organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and numerous others.

In 2009, the World Summit on Food Security stated that the “four pillars of food security are availability, access, utilization, and stability.”  Which brings us back to our initial premise – the “Green Revolution” methodology of throwing technology at the problem of food security is actually counterproductive, and tends over time to limit the availability, access, utilization and stability of food, particularly in the most food-stressed parts of the world.  To take each pillar in turn:

Availability – Numerous complications make food unavailable under the current paradigm, most notably that technological advances tend not to make production cheaper, but rather only to make production more profitable.  That is, advances in production techniques (better tractors, more powerful fertilizers, etc.) do, in fact, lead to higher yields, but they also require greater capital outlays, and (more to the point) incentivize producing food crops which will lead to a greater return on investment (ROI), not necessarily the same thing as producing crops which will be available for low cost to those who do not have enough to eat.  Poor farmers can’t produce without technology, and rich farmers don’t produce for poor consumers.

Access – Much as with availability, the economics of increasing production also limit access.  A prime example of this problem relates to rice production – the Asian economy has exploded over the past fifty years, with most of the world’s fastest growing local economies over that time period being in the region.  And rice is still, today, the most important foodstuff in every Asian city.  But because the economy has boomed for most, the price of rice has gone up for all.  And so, this simple food most Americans take for granted – and think of as cheap – has become increasingly difficult for poor families to put on their tables at dinnertime.  They have been priced out of the market – even when rice production is good (and that is not always a given thanks to pollution and global warming, both of which have wreaked havoc on rice crops in recent years), increasingly large percentages of the population simply have no access to this food staple.

Utilization –.Farmers down through history have almost never been concerned with whether or not the food they are producing is actually good for a human being to eat, and as a consequence, the marketplace is flooded with alleged food, things no one ought to ever put in their mouths, and including these poisonous calories right alongside nutritious items, and we pretend that this calculus is somehow healthy.  

Any urban space can replace a farm...
if enough of them are used

Increasingly all that improved agricultural production and all those food exports come in the form of high fructose corn syrup – that ridiculously sweet bottle of Coca-Cola started its life as somebody’s corn field.  Maize may have been one of the “three sisters” that allowed the aboriginal Amerindians to thrive, but it has turned into an addictive toxin.  It requires massive chemical intervention (in the form of fertilizer and pesticide) to grow, which poisons our waterways to the point of choking all the oxygen out of large parts of the Gulf of Mexico, and does nothing to feed malnourished children in the Sudan.  It sure has made a lot of folk exceptionally fat everywhere from Miami Beach to Seattle, Washington, though.

So, what’s the answer?  Advocates of the Green Revolution (notably Texas A&M’s own Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug) tend to discount advocates of organic farming:

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things"

The problem is, in advocating intensive monoculture factory farming, Borlaug and others threw the baby out with the bathwater.  Sustainable agriculture on the scale previously practiced could not, it is true, keep pace with population growth and urbanization.  But, long term, neither can a chemically oriented system of factory farming dependent upon ever increasing yields.  Eventually, soil which requires continual fertilizing, and tilling, and irrigation becomes played out.  Depending on increasing yields will eventually cause the whole system to break down catastrophically.

What is needed is a shift not just in production methods, but in production philosophy.

Which brings us to the fourth pillar…

Stability – Change is the only constant.  One of the strengths of a global economy, of course, is the idea that when there is a shortage in one region, it may be supplemented by imports from another region.  In practice, however, this kind of balancing of temporary shortages is not what the global food economy tends to implement.  Instead, food exports are planned in advance and tend to take advantage of the most profitable redistributions of agricultural goods, not the most needed redistributions.  That is, wheat or corn farmers will export their grain to the country that pays the most, not the one that is the hungriest.  As such, the increasing weather variability brought on by anthropogenic climate change will hit the poorest people in the world harder than it will hit anyone else – slight changes to crop conditions will lead to increasing starvation wherever people are depending on vulnerable supply chains.

The answer, then, is to decrease the vulnerability of supply chains.  And there are two ways to strengthen a chain:  1) increase the strength of the material being used to make the links – this is the “Green Revolution” approach, increasing yield-per-acre on the lands being used for agriculture; or 2) shorten the chain – this is the approach we recommend.

Potato sacks on an apartment balcony

“Not everyone can grow their own food,” goes the argument from the Green Revolutionists.  Poppycock, we say.  It is true that not everyone can put together a backyard microfarm, owing in great measure to the fact that not everyone has a backyard.  However, we have written before about the apartment porch hanging-potato-sack gardens of Nairobi, and spoken at great length about the guerilla gardeners throughout the world who will grow a stand of amaranth or a row of squash in any vacant lot, alleyway, or unused public right-of-way.

The shortest farm-to-table food supply chain is the one that requires nothing more than opening your back door and picking your salad.

Rather than trying to expand industrial farming techniques to all corners of the Earth in an attempt to turn every developing country into Kansas (which, by the way, is going to increasingly be unfarmable in coming decades, thanks to the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, so Kansas will itself be “food poor” under the current model before too terribly long), we ought to be figuring out the best possible way to turn every porch, kitchen window, alleyway, rooftop and vacant lot in the world into a community garden.  

As for the argument that we ought to focus on crop yields… well, fine.  It is easier, though, to fertilize a container garden than it is to fertilize a 100 acre farm.  And there’s no runoff to worry about. 

Potato sacks on a patio wall

 
Ultimately, food security is only one small part of an overall feeling of security which impoverished persons will never find satisfactorily addressed by anything other than economic self-sufficiency.  Relying on an international economy which not only does not put their faces or names to the issues at hand, but does not care one way or the other, is not an approach we ought to ask the people of Botswana, or Turkmenistan, or East Saint Louis, to just trust us on.

There is a strong impulse to call access to food, shelter, clothing, employment and health care and the like a “right” – we don’t quite go that far, but neither do we dismiss such arguments out of hand.  Regardless of how such fundamental human needs are categorized, the simple truth is that no one can be considered “free” who is, through no fault of their own, unable to meet those needs.  And the fastest route, the surest means, of personal security is having the means of meeting those needs for oneself and one’s family in one’s own control.

Subsistence agriculture has, for as long as the field of economics has existed, been an epithet, the marker of uncivilized humans.  It is time for that to change.  Not only should we be teaching people suffering from extreme food security crises how to be the best subsistence farmers they can be… we in the developed world ought to be doing the same thing.  The less we rely on that incredibly long (and incredibly vulnerable) international food chain, the more truly free we shall become.

Something to think about?  We hope so.

Happy farming!

The Fine Line Between Blind Tradition... and Blind Innovation

"What was life like in the colonies? Probably the best word to describe it would be 'colonial'."
--Dave Barry

We tried to come up with a more polite way to say it, but there just isn’t one:  practically everyone (ourselves included) is a hypocrite when it comes to thinking about the past.  To be fair, it is rather difficult for anyone to escape an uncomfortable disjoint in perspectives about the past – a nostalgia for the mud embodied in talk of “The Good Old Days” juxtaposed with a belief that history is an arc of progress wherein things must necessarily be getting better and better.

Everyone is prone to one extreme or the other.  We at Myrtle’s place tend to get lumped into the former point of view rather than the latter, based on the fact that we are trying to restore some fairly traditional parts of daily family life to our own little corner of the world.  Growing as much of our own food as we can, raising chickens, even drying our clothes on a line outside instead of in an electric clothes dryer, these are things that some folk would point to in justifying their belief that we are “traditionalists”.

On the other hand, we have absolutely no desire to return to the living conditions of our forebears.  The last three to four decades or so have seen air pollution, noise pollution, water pollution, light pollution, etc. ad nauseum, coupled with atrocious dietary, sleep, work, and play habits in the industrialized world which have started to eat away at the improvements we made in personal health and hygiene in the 20th century, but make no mistake – those improvements were real, and they were impressive.

And “The Good Old Days” just weren’t all they are made out to be.  Around 1900 C.E., New York City was one of the filthiest places on Earth, with smoke and soot and grime everywhere, mounds of animal feces in the streets, no clean water, no clean food, half-hearted and occasionally absent sanitation workers, toxic fumes in every home, lead paint on every wall.  Even the wealthy were living amidst vermin, contagion, and grime.  And food?  It came carted in from the countryside, covered in flies, and of questionable origin and healthfulness.  Late night comedians notwithstanding, modern New York is spotless by comparison.

But that’s just the big city, right? 

Wrong.

Not only did every major municipal center suffer the ills aforementioned, but country life was pretty unpleasant, too.  Indoor plumbing was only just becoming possible, let alone popular, which meant that outhouses had to be built for every farmhouse dotting the countryside.  All too often, these buildings were constructed with convenience (particularly mid-winter convenience) in mind, rather than sanitation.  Frequently, well water was drawn far too close to barns or latrines – just imagine the number of wells placed in between the outhouse and the barn!  Little wonder, really, that so many folk died so young back then.

The more common (and less unpleasant) nostalgic picture of the idealized past does, however, point towards some important truths about how we ought to be trying to live our lives now, even if it does not provide an accurate blueprint on how to live up to those truths.

For one thing, nostalgia almost always focuses on small themes – home, community, friends and family – rather than grand themes such as arcs of history.  Outside of a few grandiloquent politicians, nobody really wants to spend all their time focused on Manifest Destiny, or the White Man’s Burden, or Noblesse Oblige, or any of the other big themes which in the past fueled American culture and caused so many boring debates at so many stuffy cocktail parties.

No, what most folk think of when they think of the past at all is rocking chairs, garden fresh watermelon, innocent romance, picnics in the park, family and friends, somebody strumming a guitar or a banjo in the background, and most of all, nothing disturbing to think about. 

It is far too easy for nostalgic persons to fall into the trap of never trying to solve problems simply because they refuse to recognize that those problems exist – it is equally true, though, that the healthiest, happiest people are those who find some kind of equanimity in their lives.  Remove turmoil, and we go a long way towards making things better, first for ourselves, and then for those around us.

In context of olde tymes and new epochs, what this means is that we ought not deny our problems exist, nor should we allow solving those problems to lead us to traumatically undo the fabric of those things we have decided we care about.  Translation?  When fixing systemic problems, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

An excellent example, and one which makes our point (and yes, we do have one) best, is the destruction of an entire small-town, agriculture-oriented way of life, which came as a result of a solution to a problem ironically based entirely on questions of agricultural efficiency.  How to feed a hungry planet has been – justifiably – one of the principle concerns of leaders everywhere, for all of recorded and most of unrecorded history.  And in the 20th century, the so-called “Green Revolution” appeared to  solve this problem in unprecedented fashion.

The advent of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides increased the scope of farming in our heartland by orders of magnitude.  Bushels-per-acre for everything from alfalfa to zucchini increased ten-and-twenty-fold.  And in the process, we created dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, where effluvium sucked all the oxygen out of the water, and fish and coral died off and are unlikely to ever return.  And we drove small family farmers out of business, and automated practically everything, increasing small town unemployment and unemployability.  And we created a massive healthcare headache with millions of immigrant farm laborers suffering from a lifetime of chemical exposure.  And by feeding the bones of discarded animals to their next of kin, we created new nightmares like bovine spongeiform encephalopathy (BCE), better known as “Mad Cow Disease”.

Much of the developing world viewed the good which came from the Green Revolution – and it is hard to argue that large surplus supplies of grain were not largely “good” – with understandable envy.  Hollywood melodramas aside, most of the world’s leaders are in their positions not because of a lust for power, but instead because of a genuine concern for the welfare of their people, however well or unwell their applications of those concerns may manifest themselves.  And leaders in places like Bangladesh, Bhutan, Chad, Eritrea, or Sudan, just to name a handful, would obviously want to bend over backwards in order to achieve the degree of food wealth which the United States has enjoyed for almost a century now.  Food security and water scarcity (a topic worthy of its own future posting, we promise) are more important to large portions of the world’s population than practically any other considerations.

We are hopeful, however, that they employ a more thoughtful and sustainable approach than the one our own country embarked upon in the wake of the Great Depression.  Squeezing the land for every ounce of nutrient content has filled our grocery shelves, but it has also made us fat, lazy, diseased, arrogant, and unconnected.  We talk on phones we would not have the first clue how to build on our own, drive in heavily computerized automobiles we can no longer fix ourselves, and eat food which comes from God only knows where, grown God only knows how.

It does not have to be this way.  Every year at Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza, we find that pretty much all of our visitors have their own chicken stories.  This is because until just two generations ago, practically everyone in this country had chickens.  The vast majority of folk also used to grow their own fruits and vegetables, too.

And not just country folk, and not just homeowners.   Most tenements in most big cities had rooftop vegetable gardens, though they were limited by the availability of water, and time (particularly before the Progressive Era, when thanks to labor unions, the average workday shrunk from as much as 12 to 16 hours down to a more manageable 8-10). 

The move completely away from self-sufficiency did not really begin until the post-World War II era, when the ideal home stopped being a place where food was produced, and started becoming a box in which goods could be stored.  When we moved to newly built suburbs, away from both the city center, and away from the countryside, we got rid of our chickens.  We spent our time driving to and from work, instead of kneeling in the garden, tending to our crops.

A lot more was lost in this transition, too.  Not only did we stop being responsible for our own food, we stopped spending as much time together as families and communities.  And while we had heretofore depended on shipped in food to supplement what we grew ourselves, we were suddenly depending on large agribusiness to provide all our nutrient needs.  Suddenly, farming had to be big business.  Which meant that even more people would move away from the countryside. 

Small town America is the essence of an idealized picture that cannot exist, given this vicious circle.  And ironically, those who champion the small town most are frequently part of the very industries and political movements which have doomed that lifestyle.

A move away from luxury and back towards subsistence is, in our view, the best solution to many of the problems we created in the last half of the 20th century.  The best part is, it isn’t even that hard to achieve.  We love our land here at Myrtle’s place, because we have a full half-acre to play with; not only do we have the chicken coop, but we also have roughly 2,500 square feet of garden – including the herb garden – and also not one, but two rainwater collection ponds, and a bunch of fruit trees and vines.  All that having been said, you don’t need any land in order to start transitioning to a simpler subsistence-based economy. 

In Nairobi, for instance, there are entire apartment buildings where you will see a huge potato sack hanging from every balcony, full of dirt, and with vegetables growing from slits in the sides.  Guerilla gardeners have laid claim to alleyways and any public patch of dirt, to grow corn, amaranth, and practically anything else they can think of to sell in inner city farmer’s markets.  One can prepare a year’s worth of meals there without buying anything that came from a traditional “farm”.

And really, when you think about it, all gardening is “container” gardening.  Whether your container is a 9” clay pot sitting on a windowsill, or a 5’x5’ raised bed in your backyard, or a 1,000,000 hectare wheat field in the countryside, there is a measurable quantity of soil to be maintained, which will yield a measurable amount of produce. 

Most of the problems related to poor soil tilth – including not only the failure of a given plot of ground to produce after it has been overfarmed, but also the problems for the neighboring environment related to runoff from the container – are actually much easier to handle when the scope and scale is smaller.  Raised beds in the backyard, much like the clay pots on a balcony, represent spaces in which the addition of nutritious compost is relatively easy, and the possibility of runoff into neighboring watersheds is also relatively simple to control.

What we are talking about, then, is scaling back the nature of “farming” to be less about feeding hordes of people on a few large, extensive plots of land, and instead feeding smaller groups of people on many more, but much smaller, containers of soil.  Change the scale, and the practices can be made healthier without damaging the communities involved.

Subsistence farming has traditionally gotten a bad rap – so much so that children’s history textbooks frequently speak of the “improvement” of moving away from subsistence based economies.  And in some palpable senses, there is truth to this prejudice.  Slash and burn techniques, for example, are contributing to deforestation in the Amazon; nomadic herding led to desertification in much of central Asia; the list of other ills encumbered by subsistence lifestyles throughout the world is lengthy.

However, what we are talking about is a new model for subsistence.  We are not talking about some 40-acres-and-a-mule government sponsored restructuring of society, whether American or otherwise.  We are talking about collectively taking individual responsibility for our own nutrient needs.  The Nairobi model, in particular, is inspiring, because Nairobi, Kenya, has so many other problems.  It is really one of the last places around the globe where you would expect folk to be blithely self-sufficient, and yet, many of them are. 

Faced with immense population density, and most of the troubles which face most of the other large cities in the developing world, a solution to this most basic of problems – how can I get enough to eat – has been propounded not by any international agency, but by a few hardy inner city pioneers.  In the face of global warming, air pollution, water scarcity, etc., however, they do not have enough wherewithal to solve even their own problems, let alone those of other people susceptible to want and hunger.  Everyone, everywhere, can do something, but no one, anywhere, can do everything.

Government must get involved at some point if in no other way than to clear obstacles to personal responsibility – laws such as those in some U.S. communities against growing vegetables in one’s front yard, for example.  Or restrictive ordinances on backyard chickens.  Subsidies for agribusiness, too, tend to depress the availability of resources for small-scale producers.  And protection of insidious organizations like Monsanto, whose patents on their invasive varieties of genetically modified crops, also tend to squeeze out smaller producers in favor of factory farms.

On the whole, though, it really is up to individuals, whether living in College Station, Texas, or Mt. Union, Pennsylvania, or Tokyo, Japan, to take back control of the production of what we consume.  In the Colonial era, North America was dotted with small towns and villages where virtually all needs were provided either by oneself or one’s neighbors.  Ships and wagons brought luxuries from other places; what went on one’s plate came from “out back” or “across the way”.  Much the same has historically been true everywhere in the world; and the solution to the ills created by getting away from that model is also the same pretty much everywhere.

Growing more of our own food, whether in garden plots, or in raised beds, or in containers on porches and window sills, increases food security, decreases pollution, improves personal economies, and improves nutrition.  We can get back to the ideal food production model without also bringing back cholera, witch burnings, and bad fashion.  Well, okay, maybe not without bringing back bad fashion.  But two out of three ain’t bad.

Happy farming!