I disagree that economic productivity is at odds with sustainability. Perhaps most of the agriculture in the world is, but the example(s) I gave are successful with almost zero input. The only thing humans add to those cattle operations is minerals to replace the minerals removed by the cattle every year. The minerals are calcium and a dose of seaweed providing micronutrients. Otherwise there is no seed, fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, iron, special dusts, hormones, medicine, or anything else. If the calves are going to be sold to a feed lot, the owners will take a week to teach them how to eat corn, so that bumps up their cost by $5/head. Otherwise they have a cost of $20 each which includes labor, property taxes, fencing, repairs, and watering system but not land costs. These yearlings are selling for around $1/pound and they weigh about 675 pounds at the sale. So if you have a profit of $650 each and you sell a couple three hundred every year, pretty soon that will pay your mortgage, utility, and food bills.

What makes this sustainable is the practice of NOT adding all that junk to the operation. Probably the biggest mistake in livestock is to kill things like worms and weeds. When you cull for animal health like Nature does and feed unadulterated native grass, everything starts to come back to a natural healthy balance.

Let me play the devil's advocate here for the moment. What I am about to write is actually my recurrent nightmare as an organic farmer.

The thrust, by direction and institutional support, of modern agriculture is away from reliance on natural limits on productivity. The goal is thorough industrialization of the production cycle for the few plant and animal varieties capable of thriving in such systems. We are well on the way.

So genetic engineering will create varieties of highly productive clones tolerant of adverse growing conditions. Such tolerance will allow growing in colder or hotter conditions on poorer soils with little water and perhaps even brackish or saline water. Biotrons will shelter grow chambers of improved crops as ag advances even into polar regions. My point is that the biotechnologists seek to make areas of natural arability irrelevant as the basis for productivity.

In the meantime, such biotech advances will spread through the most favored ag regions and drive farm consolidations further. The USDA predicted back in the early 2000s that consolidation will result in as few as 150,000 ag companies managing 200,000-300,000 acres each. Rural communities would come to be irrelevant and unsupported by these highely automated operations. So officially we have 1,900,000 surplus farming operations now. So much for the family farmer and the communities that supported them.

In the meantime, there is little interest in engineering most "minor crops" (everything else other than the big five or six industrialized crops). These are the fruits and vegetables and nuts and mushrooms, and other foods that should dominate the USDA Food Pyramid. Minor crops get few or no subsidies now from the Farm Bill and are losing technical support from local university and state ag as these bastions of small farm support join the biotech revolution of agriculture.

The biotech/industrial ag interests focus on the big grains, fiber, and oil crops because these are more valuable in value added industrial and food processing. As an example, sit down to a dinner with no apparent corn being served but as much as half the ingredients were derived from corn and byproducts. Processed and enhanced packaged food need little input off the minor crop shelves.

In the gleam of the biotechnologist's eye is the vision of unlimited food and fiber (and now biofuels) created out of the laboratory and brought to cheap abundance by industrialized production methods. Other technologies would assure extended shelf life and increased variety of enhanced flavors and textures, new foods for new people. To commodity companies and their government supporters, the new agriculture is great for globalized trade.

How's that for devilishness.

Hey Marshall :) Been a while, hope you're doing well.

You wrote:

"The thrust, by direction and institutional support, of modern agriculture is away from reliance on natural limits on productivity. The goal is thorough industrialization of the production cycle for the few plant and animal varieties capable of thriving in such systems. We are well on the way."

To my mind, once one accepts the larger realities of industrial agriculture you describe above -- which I do, because your description is accurate to the world I see -- the next question arises, what can we as individuals do?

My personal context as an innercity dweller is to think about what I can do for myself, for my friends and family. And how to persuade my neighbors to do the same. Because most of the people who are alive right now live in cities, not countryside. If individuals are to make a difference, IMO the focus needs to shift from rural macroculture to urban microculture.

I'm not speaking as a pie-in-sky idealist here. I live in one of the top five most culturally significant cities in the western hemisphere (Toronto.) And I'm mindful that the population of my city is about the same as Havana, Cuba.

When Havana was faced with the loss of USSR agricultural subsidies and oil-based agriculture a few decades ago, Cuban citizens converted to organic agriculture in urban areas. Now 80% of the food consumed within the city is grown there.

I'd like to ask you, as a long-experienced and practiced agricultural expert: what more do you think people who live in cities can do, to promote and encourage long term urban agriculture?

(Let's assume, for the purpose of the question, that the obvious answers of recycling instead of discarding one's own waste products; and the further answers of gathering up what is now regarded as urban trash and making it into compostables and soil products -- let's assume that's already being done.)

So... based on your experience: what concrete and specific advice would you offer to urban gardeners, to practically improve their soil, the quality of their crops, and their yields -- over time?

And what more can we urban growers do, to make a difference in the larger world?

All the best,
-Patrick
(who personally believes the future of agriculture is no longer just rural)

p.s. The question is also open to others, please feel free to speak up.

Here is a link that might be useful: Havana's Popular Gardens: Sustainable Urban Agriculture

Dchall, I don't doubt what you say. It's really no more than what herds-people practiced for centuries. So as economic production for individuals, it comes down to control over large areas of land. So it'll work fine where there are thousands of acres of marginal land with little pressure on it for other uses, and a way to move the cattle or the meat long distances.

Marshall, you make the biotechnologists seem downright evil! I suppose in the short run GW is going to aid their efforts. I think it's all going to be moot though over the course of this century as petro-fertilizers and chemicides are exhausted.

Patrick, I agree that urban mini-gardeners will have an important role to play in the near future (although I also believe that humanity's urban phase is nearing it's end). Your comparison of Toronto to Havana brings to my mind a very obvious but nonetheless intractable problem: sun-angle. Shade from densely-packed urban buildings isn't much of an issue under the tropical sun; in the higher latitudes it's a major issue. Some buildings may have the flat roofs needed for roof-top gardening, but many - probably most - smaller urban residences do not. So that is a limiting factor.

When you say "one's own waste products" do you mean human feces and urine? I'm not sure why we should assume people are already using that for fertilizer - urban or not - when we know very well that hardly anyone is. That is one of the major issues to be resolved, IMO. The entire weight of officialdom is against it, and yet it absolutely must happen on a huge scale.

Hey Pnbrown. :) Sun angle is an issue, given Cuba is not very far north of the equator and our location here is just south of halfway from the equator to the pole. However, in the most productive months of the year the sun's path does tend to shift more towards overhead. And although the late afternoon shade from our three-story house does reduce growth, garden plants do surprisingly well here on morning to early afternoon sun.

My reference to waste products wasn't meant to include humanure, though I agree with you it's a major urban issue. If I gardened just for myself, I would be adding my pee to the garden. However, most non-gardeners don't understand the health issues; and I wouldn't want to either lie to them about how I grow food, or upset them by telling them what fed the soil to feed the plants they're eating.

For now, most of the nitrogen I add to the soil comes from taking all the UCG supplied by a local coffeeshop, plus buying one 50lb bag of alfalfa pellets per year. The former is not long-term sustainable, but for now I'm diverting it from becoming landfill and turning at least a small part of it into local humus. Should both nitrogen supplies end, I'll certainly be reconsidering the use of pee in my compost. And including more nitrogen-fixing plants in the garden.

All the best,
-Patrick

Hey Patrick, yes it has been some time passing. You "sound" great.

I am all for mini-farming in and on the fringes of urban centers. That is what I do. I do believe, given the will, cities and surrounding areas can be a lot more self-sufficient and incorporate recycling of human-generated green and biosolid and tertiary-treated water wastes through food production as well as parks and other greenbelt developments. Here are some concrete steps toward more sustainable urban living.

First: Get rid of all those city ordinances that limit or hinder agriculture and food horticulture in cities. In many cities and towns, it is illegal to grow vegetable gardens in front yards.

Second: Convert abandoned lots and under-utilized public lands into community gardens and where possible land leasable to commercial mini-farms. Such mini-farms would serve also as demonstration sites and perhaps limited training grounds for future mini-farmers and gardeners.

Third: Add gardens to primary schools as models and for basic training in growing and eating your own food. We have to catch the imagination and desire of children early and teach them good eating habits.

Four: Establish public or private-run gardens demonstrating gardening and mini-farming techniques and materials. E.g., gardening on paved parking lots, rooftops and walls.

Five: Make available composted waste products for use in the above. Private firms can process and bag these materials in convenient sizes.

Six: Establish "marketing" programs for allowing surplus produce to be redistributed within the community. Even small urban gardens will overproduce at times relative to family consumption. Let this abundance feed others in the community.

Experience teaches me that the above steps will affect only a small percentage of city dwellers owing to lack of space, time, inclination and skills. To these disincentives, add the attractions of cheap subsidized food, especially packaged foods offering convenience and alleged flavor.

But we can hope and plan for changes to come.

Madmagic, the only way urban microculture would become common place is after a period of mass hunger. Too many people avoid perspiring even for there own benefit. I live in a city of about 15000 families; the city bought an old farm to convert into a park with a substantial section set aside for community gardens. The city would till the land and provide the seeds. All you had to do is plant, maintain and harvest. It was advertised in a Monthly city publication, sent to every family, every spring for 5 years. Over that period of time they had zero takers. The city recently suspended a composting program because nobody was taking any finished compost. They ended up taking it to a land fill.

If you want more of something all you have to do is have government subsidize it. Maybe we should quit subsidizing the industrial Ag interests and start subsidizing the back yard gardener. Another approach would be to quit giving people so many fish and start teaching them to how to fish.

John

That's astounding, John. I'd have been all over that offer. What about you? Didn't need any extra space? Zero out of 15,ooo - that tells ya something, doesn't it?

I recommend you consider the Rodale Institute's report on their 25(?) year trial of organic alongside conventional for some represerntative field crops. For the earlier years, yields of organic were less than conventional. But later organic caught up and in some cases overtook conventional -- especially when climate was adverse. Beside which input costs were less, soil condition was far better -- sustainable if you wish -- and (although this wasn't measured) we can be sure that the mineral and volatile organic compoud content of the produce has been superior. Regards, Peter B.

pnbrown, My garden was 20ft X 70ft at the time and produced more vegetables than we could use. That along with a side of beef and a pig, filled a 23 cubic freezer and still ended up giving many vegetables away. I have been composting for 50 years and always had what I needed.

John

Thanks, Peter, for reminding us of on-going research and demonstration regenerative ag work by Rodale Institute. The model they used is related to traditional cycles of crop rotations, green manuring and other soil enhancing and crop growing techniques. Unfortunately modern agribusiness has adopted monocropping or at best a two-crop cycle with large regions supporting very little crop diversity.

The age of diversified family farming passed on about 60 years ago as children of farmers moved into other occupations and the old farmers died away. However, The last two decades have seen accelerating revivals of more diversified farming under the rubrics of organic farming, biodynamic farming and so on.

The problem in sustaining this revival is that we have lost much of our agrarian ethos including a work ethic placing high value on manual labor and the fruits thereof. John's Pennsylvania city's failure to support greener gardening and local food production though composting projects and community garden is closely related to the missing agrarian ethic. Hanging out on YourTube has much greater cultural value than growing and sharing your food.

John, the city must have studied the reasons why those two projects failed. Did the city solicit garden centers and home-improvement center to offer specials and assistance to citizens wanting to either create food gardens at homes or cultivate community gardens. Was there community leadership at the city gardens, complete with tools and technical advice? Was there sufficient security (fencing and other) to allow even the elderly a bit of safety?

I helped revitalize and manage our city's 3 community gardens. Each is located in relatively lower income areas and/or senior housing. There was always a waiting list. A fourth one was proposed for an ex-urban/suburban location but "marketing" tests found low interest in an area with decent size yards but families uninterested in food gardening.

Marshallz10, The median income for the city is above national avg and any low income arias are small. As to your other questions, I donÂt know the answers except the compost was offered for free to landscapers and mulch/compost retailers with out takers. When I have more vegetables than I can give to friends and family I will put them on a table beside the alley and they are always gone in a couple of hours. I have never been asked if I use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. As long as the food is available and at the right price and they can pay there dues at the health club they are happy.

John

60 yrs ago = 1947. It seems the disruptive effect of WWII had much to do with the destruction of the last vestiges of subsistence agrarianism in this country (as one who can perhaps just remember that era, Marshall, do you agree?).

From reading the printed records of a long-running oral-history project on this formerly subsistently agrarian island, it's clear that WWII was the rubicon. I was amazed to learn that even after the war there were still guys using horse-power, cutting hay by scythe and storing it loose, and generally practicing subsistence largely unaltered from the 19th century (Thomas Hart Benton did a famous series of paintings with some of them as subjects). But that only lasted until the pre-war generation died out. Of the young generation returning from the war, those few that returned to farming naturally turned to the more modern methods. A couple of commercial dairies held on here until the 70's and 80's, against the odds.

Now there is a total of perhaps one hundred acres arable in vegetables, perhaps a thousand in hay for the horse industry, a couple small beef ranchers, a sheep-and-wool-products farm, and one committed subsistence-model homestead. And a few scattered lunatics such as myself.

Pnbrown, both of my GFs were farmers. The one GF quit farming in the late 40s, he bread and sold draft horses. Age, family moving on and declining demand for draft horses were the reasons. I use to help my other GF in the summer and week ends during school. I have cut hay and straw with a scythe rake it by hand into windrows pitch onto a wagon and into the hay miles. He operated this farm in to the late 50s without electricity or a tractor. I still have my GGFs anvil and my GFs scythe and manure fork. I think the fork is the garden tool I use most often.

I think a big reason for the decline of the family farm is the decline in family size and the cost of labor to replace it. I also think the biggest reason is Govt. programs like subsidies and the land bank.

John

The evolution from from agrarian economy to industrial one was well underway (based on non-farm employment) by the Depression. The Depression and the Fed's effort to help rural poor delayed the transition away from homestead farming. After the war, lots of farming of share-cropping kinds was lost. See for example the wave of black subsistence farmers leaving for the North during and right after WWII.

Most of the farm boys that went off to war never went back to their home farms to take up from their parents. The vast industries of war mostly closed down and the women making up that workforce went back to home life and making new families. As the surviving undamaged major economy, the US expanded consumer production and help the recovery of allies and former enemies. The farm boys found permanent off-farm employment. Today there are few jobs in rural farm regions with industrial ag.

I picked 1947 because this year more or less marked the change in the USDA and the rise of the petrochemical industries as the major component of large scale agribusiness. By Eisenhower's time and Ezra Taft Benson's USDA the mantra became: Get Big or Get Out. Benson made a little publicized speech using this phrase around the mid-1950's. Stubborn old farmers held on for another 20 years of so but in the face of active disincentives from government programs and farm-credit businesses, they continued to disappear.

Got to go do farm marketing for the rest of the day.

Well, I grew up on a farm that was general farming in the Midwest. About all the farms were general. You raised some dairy, beef, hogs, sheep, and poultry. there was one large farm operation that had several hired men, but that was the exception.

My dad had both tractors and a couple draft horses [until the late '40s.] He had a two row corn planter, got a two row cornpicker in 1940; had a sickle bar mower that was horse drawn until the Massey Harris dealer converted it over to a tractor drawn 7' mower. Combines were 6-7 feet cut and loose hay was made through 1946 and then it was baled.

Soon after 1950 things changed. We no longer raised sheep or turkeys and the laying flock was purchased ready to lay with the newest breeding. The tractors got bigger and the planters went to 4 row and later 6; then 8; then 12; then 16. The combines went throgh the same metamorphus to 30'. The neighbor farmer died or retired and his son worked in the factory so the land was leased out. Cows were sold off and poultry wasn't very profitable on a small scale. More land was boughten and leased......and on and on.

Now it is 80' sprayers, 16 row planters, and 1500 acres of mostly corn and soybeans. The old 160 acre spread was finished.

Marshall, thank you for those six well-worded and very well-considered suggestions. Some of them are being done here. For one example, we have a city-run composting program which takes yard waste bags from curbside, composts them, and returns the compost to the community.

Unfortunately the real pressure to "go green" wasn't (and isn't) idealistic or environmental. Finding a place to landfill city garbage was the real problem.

There are programs run by nonprofit organizations and local hospitals which do community gardening & marketting (as well as traditional allotments) and increasing numbers of farmers' markets. Dunno about gardening in schools, I'm not current on educational issues.

Jbest123, that is truly a shame about the lack of response to the city program you describe. People here would have loved something like that -- there's always more gardeners than space for them in this city. And every spring when the city dumps a large truckload of black compost in the park, it's swarmed over and disappears within 2-3 days. People haul it home in bundle buggies, on bikes, in wheelbarrows, in backpacks and bags.

However, I fear you may be right that people won't embrace gardening unless severe economic shock forces them to it. Between busy work schedules and food prices kept artificially low, many folks don't see it as worthwhile. Though I hope as more of the baby boom generation retire we'll see increased efforts in gardening.

(Sorry for my late responses, I have enjoyed this thread and hope it continues.)

All the best,
-Patrick

Cool story, Wayne. Is the old farm gone, or do you live there still? It's so astounding to me that 160 acres of prime arable land is considered too little to bother with. Whatever happened to the logic of appropriate scale? One doesn't simply give up gardening because one's garden plot isn't big enough to justify the biggest most expensive roto-tiller. So why is a 160-acre farm ludicrous because it doesn't justify the biggest combine? Especially when you can buy an appropriately small used combine for a song from the fool who just bought the biggest one and still has the 30-year old one sitting in the equipment shed. I'd bet anything I could get a living off 160 acres, and maybe a trifle of cash as well. And pass the land on un-degraded. But it wouldn't pay for kids to go to college, or for a new car every four years.

Thanks, Patrick, for the kind words. I am a bit of a fanatic about food security, good eating, teaching kids about their agrarian heritage and some of the skills to grow and prepare your own. Most of us no longer have farming relatives and at least in this country, little cultural incentive or encouragement to conserve and practice more than boutique gardening.

Wayne, thank you for your family's history during the time of rapid ag changes. I've heard or read a lot of stories like that and each pain me in profound ways.

Pat,
The old farm is still here. One acre was sold to my sister for a house. Later,the farm was sold. Now my second cousin and corporation opperate it. They moved when the 15 acre woods was cut and she couldn't handle looking at the scene daily. I had a house built in the old acre+ orchard.

My brother started in farming, but left when he had a call to the ministry. I had been working in the automotive plant and hadn't planned to really farm. I am not sorry about my "decision" as it turned out to be a very good living. Also when you see how things have gone mostly to big time farming without the kind of care needed for the land, I am happy to raise just my little "acre" at this time in my life.

This post has been reverberating back and forth in my head for some time. Great conversation but something has been bothering me. The subject line sort of infers that sustainability is not economically productive. I donÂt know much about grain crops but back in the 1950s The Farm Journal use to publish the names of the farmers that reached 200 bu/acre of corn. It amused my dad who said that when he was a boy on the farm they routinely got over 200 bu. And I will compare my vegetables quantity and quality with any conventional gardener/farmer and I garden the same way as my Father and Gfather did.


Most of the owners of ag companies donÂt live in the same state let alone on the farm and they are not going to change until the bottom line $$$ changes. There ought to be a way to get the organic farmers who use to be a conventional farmer together with equipment manufactures to come up with a procedure to convert to organic farming with minimal loss of income in the interim. Maybe it would take 10 yrs and maybe a start with partial organics with a goal to total organics. A big problem would be to get the equipment manufactures to buy in to it. If some farms in the range 200 to 500 acres would convert and improve there bottom line, maybe some people would set up and take notice.


John

Hello every one. Newbie with his first post,

I would like to respond to marshallz10 6 points by talking about my community.

The first point about city ordinance is spot on. The citizens here have recently gotten a bylaw changed that kept home owners from having chickens on there property. Now we can have 5 chickens and apply for an exemption to have more. This in a town where more then half the land is still in the ALR (Agriculture land reserve) and run by small family farms.

We have a few community gardens and demonstration gardens. But there is a development proposal on some farm land that soil is considered unusable for farming, for a mixed development of housing and small acreage farming controlled by and organic land trust as well as a community farming collage.

The primary school in my area does a year round guarding program. It is the only one I know of and it just finished its first year.

We have a yard wast pick up program where they take it away and make compost. Once a year you can go to the dump and pick up a truck load for free. And all year you can go a buy it there. For the price of $5 for 500 Kg (about 1000lbs I think) of compost. You just have to go and collect it.

What we donÂt have is a good year round farmers market. We have a couple of summer markets but that is it. With our mild winters on the west coast I Know there are several farms that grow almost year round.

Thanks
Shawn

John, you say they "used" to get 200-bushel corn, implying to my mind that at some point that ceased to be the ruitine. Why?

Sustainable, IMO, means yields that are reliable not just for a generation or two but for dozens. In north america it's difficult to find a model to study, due to the constant push to more fertile lands. Why did we always have to move on to "better" soils? Now there is essentially no place to move onto, which should be scaring us silly. The Brazilian "cerrado" is one of the few places left for un-turned soil an freshly-productive, and a disturbingly large portion of the world's population depends upon it to evade starvation. The cerrado will be exhausted quicker than most places have been in the past is my guess.

You sure are right though, nothing is going to change until the big profits have been extracted. After that, during the tumble to a sustainable agriculture, there is going to be some horrible situations.

John, you say they "used" to get 200-bushel corn


I meant that when my Father and Gfathers were still farming. Neither farm was mechanized and they picked there corn by hand. Mt Father told me that the equipment in those days would leave as much as 20% of the corn in the field. In more recent times when hunting pheasant, it is still evident that they leave a lot in the field, I do not know about today though.


John

Here is a link that might be useful: Johns Journal

John, thank you for linking me to your site; good stuff and good thinking! I tried to register to leave a comment but wasn't able to get the page to complete registration.

Shawn, thanks for sharing how your community is expanding sustainability. Personal sustainability is definitely different than community sustainability. They might actually work at cross purposes; for example, if many people grow or raise their own food, there is less opportunity for selling in farmer's market.

Marshallz10, just received an email that you are registered. Thanks for looking at the journal and any comments will be appreciated.


John

Here is a link that might be useful: Johns Journal

Pnbrown, there are thousands of farms here in PA that have been farming the same fields for over 200 yrs. Many of the farms are Amish, which should be a good model for sustainability farming. In addition, many have kept current with modern procedures and should be a good model for contemporary farming. Now you have me wondering why nobody has compared the production of the two procedures. Maybe it is because neither procedure would be applicable for horizon-to-horizon farming.


John

Here is a link that might be useful: Johns Journal