Biodiversity
Blighted: A Tomato Story from Utica, NY
Published August 17, 2009 @ 12:37PM PT
Two weekends ago, my good friend Annie told me she had some bad news for me. As we were celebrating our friends Reshma's wedding, I was a little taken a back. Bad news? What. Then, she proceeded to tell me that Nancy Grove, her sister in-law and my friend, lost her entire tomato crop to Late Blight. If we weren't at a wedding, I'd probably have started to loudly curse the food system that has enabled the Late Blight (aka Irish Potato Famine) to spread across the North East. But, I bit my tongue for once.
For me, Nancy's loss is personal. In June, I spent hours pounding these super heavy, taller than me, metal posts into the ground for the trellacing of her 600 tomato plants. It is amazing how spending a few hours of manual labor with 600 tomato plants builds a solid relationship. Needless to say, I was devestated to learn that all my hard work, and more so, all Nancy's hard work was for naught.
I know we've talked about Late Blight on here, you have read it in newspapers, or seen it on tv. But, I thought, given's Nancy's loss, I could use this opportunity to show you what it really means when a small scale, organic farmer loses her entire crop of tomatoes.
First things first
Meet Nancy. Nancy is one of the new generation farmers taking the nation by storm. Raised by an engineer turned bagel baking family in rural upstate NY, Nancy started her career canvassing for the Clean Air Council in Philadelphia before ditching the city for working with the earth. Nancy spent time working on the Heiffer International farm outside of Worcester, MA, before being an apprentice on Caretaker Farm near Williamstown, MA.
After her apprentice year, Nancy returned to the outskirts of Utica, NY- home of the famous Bagel Grove Bagels- to begin her own organic farm. Harpening back to the ideals that influence her work as a farmer, she aptly named her project, Old Path Farm. Starting in the first season, 2005-2006, Nancy was able to sign up CSA (community supported agriculture) members, sell at local farmers markets, and supply the Bagel Grove with seasonally available produce.
Now, Old Path Farm is in their fifth season growing 3 acres of eighty varieties of veggies. Nancy has a loyal membership base of 75 CSA members who buy in for $400/season ( June to October),and she sells at a few farmers markets in the Mohawk Valley.
"The diversity of the farm is my favorite part," explains Nancy, "I'd be bored if we only grew one thing. Lettuce is big all summer. Carrots and beets are standard, as in Swiss Chard. Right now, the fall crops are starting to full out"
Blighted
Late in July, Nancy began to suspect the worse for her tomato plants. And, within a week, the climax of her farming season- nineteen varieties of tomatoes- went from going strong to rotting on the vine. But, before I tell you about the blighted plants and what she had to do, I want to walk you through all the hard work it takes to get the tomatoes from seed to your homemade salsa or gazpacho.
For some of Nancy's tomatoes, the work began last year with saving seeds from her successful crop. For the rest of the tomato plants, Nancy had to spend time and money ( both short supply for small scale organic farmers) to order seeds from a company.
Nancy explained, "We grow early hybrids and heirlooms...black trim, green zebra, and brandywine, among others. We spend about three hours with three hours planting all the seeds in the first of April." The major cost up front, besides the seeds, is the potting soil and the cost to heat the green house. For the next month, Nancy or another member of the farm, waters the tomatoes twice a day.
"A few weeks later," Nancy describes, "we have to transfer the seedlings into bigger pots in the greenhouse. That takes about ten hours." The seedlings stay in the bigger pots for another month and half, with twice a day waterings and energy being used to heat the green house."
While the tomato seedlings are growing in the green house, Nancy and her team wait for spring ground to thaw. Once the ground is workable, the Old Path Farm team begins the arduous task of preparing the tomato beds for the season. Imagine a track of land, and you need to turn this track of land into the perfect environment for six hundred of your favorite tomato seedlings so they can grow into adult tomato plants producing lots of fruit ( err, vegetables). For this process, the crew has to create rows which involves turning the soil, hoeing, and mulching. The mulch is pricey, but worth it since Nancy can count on 30% of her farmers market profits to come from the tomatoes.
Once the seedlings have become hardy, it takes fifteen hours of labor to transfer the seedings to rows out on the farm. This process is time consuming because the plants needs to be spaces correctly, groups by variety, and care needs to be taken to protect the root structure. Once the plants are in the ground, the team continues to weed, water, and watch the plants. During this process, the plants are suckered continuous- which is a way to keep the plants from growing all over the place.
A few weeks after transplanting, the work to trellace the growing plants begins. About 70 metal and wooden six feet high stakes are pounded into the ground after every fourth tomato plant. This takes one person about five hours and is wearing on the back. Once the stakes are up, every week or so, another loop of twine is strung between the stakes, allowing the tomatoes to be fully supported as grow towards the sky.
In a normal year, Nancy and her crew would continue to trellace, weed, and water, and the get ready for weekly harvests. But, this isn't an normal year thanks to big box stores selling late blight infected plants and a rainy season to create perfect conditions for the late blight. Instead of celebrating the hard work, in late July, Nancy realized her 600 plants were carrying this dangeous pathogen and she had to figure out what to do.
"We had no idea what to look for," explained Nancy upon seeing the stems and leaves with the blog. "I had heard about late blight but I had no idea how damaging it could be... some farms have alot more invested in tomatoes," said Nancy, who ended up taking a "crash course, of sorts," on late blight. Pete, another member of the farm, attended the Northeast Organic Farming Conference in Massachusetts in early August, where he went to a workshop on late blight but "no one knew what was best." Nancy told of one farmer she knew who "was going to burn his tomatoes and potatoes."
As her tomatoes from went from scrumptious to fungus, Nancy decided that she need to dedicated a whole work day to undoing a season of work, documented in the following photographs. Luckily, they were able to borrow a dump truck to make the work slightly easier. In short, Nancy and her crew had to pull up each of the six hundred tomato plants by the roots, which first involved undoing the trellaces and pulling up the stakes.
The metal stakes are spending the next twelve months baking in the sun to kill the late blight on them, while they are deciding if the wooden stakes need to be burnt. While they were pulling up the stakes and the plants, they had to be extra careful about the tomatoes. 
Each tomato carried they late blight in the form of spores, so even one being left behind could start its own out break and each tomato carries seeds which gladly will become volunteer plants, meaning that they reseed very readily. So, they spent a lot of time picking up each tomato and separating the plants for compost, and the tomatoes for being thrown away.
On a far, far, far corner of the farm, beneath a gray tarp, a season of work is heating up in compost. 
For the next few years, the organic matter of the plants decomposing will fight off all the remaining spores of the late blight, and eventually Nancy plans to have scientists from Cornell test the materials. Meanwhile, it is hoped that the pulling of the tomato plants will help preserve the land in the main part of the farm. But, " a huge concern is next year- this year is bad enough. How do we prevent this from over wintering", wonders Nancy.
Nancy's says that her CSA members have been supportive and understanding of the late blight. She's been adding in extra vegetables to compensate from the of tomatoes, usually thought of as the climax of the farming season. She's gotten about ten condolence letters form her members all with the same message "We love your veggies. We'll be here next year." But, this has caused a domino effect at the farmers market. Since she is adding extra greens and other veggies the weekly boxes, she has less to bring to market. She expects to lose at least 30% of her farmers markets profits this season.
All in all, Nancy has not been able to put a dollar on the losses sustained to Old Path Farm his year. From the time invested to the new boxes, stakes, and materials she has to purchase, it is going to cut into her bottom line. Yet, she is luckier than other farmers. She had the time to take a full day to address the problem, and because she grows a large variety of vegetables, she is able to keep on going this year.
Nancy hopes that next year, people buy their tomato seedlings direct from a farmer ( Some even have seedling CSA's) and avoid stores like Home Depot or Wal-Mart. She explains "( the box stores" are a source of homeland insecurity and that its a food system set up for catastrophe. If this were as important as Britney Spears, then people would care about food systems. I've learned how insecure our food system is, and we cannot shelter ourselves from society or our greater eco system. There are no real boundaries that protect us."
Nancy's one hope is that "this is a kick in the butt for organic farmers to get healthier soils so they blight won't knock us down."
Those of us who love farm fresh organic veggies need to realize we have a role to play here. We need to spend our dollars at local farms and realize our actions have consequences. One quick trip to a box store could end up with a farmer like Nancy having to pull up her whole season of work in one day. We need to be our farmers keepers.
(Thanks to Ed Grove for the photos. Thanks to Nancy Grove for the interview and letting my hangout on Old Path Farm. I'll come back next year for staking!)
U.S. Farmers Love Biotech...Apparently
Published July 16, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Farmers in the United States are continuing to plant genetically engineered crops at unprecedented levels according to a report released recently by the USDA's Economic Research Service.
The report found that the adoption (the percentage of farmers planting a certain kind of crop) of GE soybeans reached 91 percent; the adoption of GE cotton reached 88 percent; and the adoption of all biotech corn climbed to 85 percent in 2009.
Farmers are doing this despite claims that growing biotech crops in the U.S. has done little to increase yields. According to the Failure to Yield (pdf) report (previously cited on this blog) conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientist's Doug Gurian-Sherman:
...genetically engineering herbicide-tolerant soybeans and herbicide-tolerant corn has not increased yields. Insect-resistant corn, meanwhile, has improved yields only marginally. The increase in yields for both crops over the last 13 years, the report found, was largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.
So why are U.S. farmers continuing to plant biotech crops?
World According to Monsanto, pt 10, Taking Over
Published July 09, 2009 @ 07:43AM PT
This last episode of the documentary covers the GMO-mediated takeover of South American farmland, replacing small, diverse farms with a desert of genetically engineered soybeans that will be fed mainly to livestock in wealthier nations.
But, but, but ... we need to feed the world, right? Yes. And there are much better ways to do that.
Dr. Doug Gurian-Sherman, an expert in genetic engineering, explains as much in an interview at The Ethicurean.
First, he explains the difference between types of yield. There's intrinsic yield increase, higher food production capacity mediated by the genes and environmental interactions of the plant. Then, there's operational yield increase, where losses from pests and weed competition are cut, therefore boosting net yield.
Gurian-Sherman worked on the Union of Concerned Scientists' report demonstrating only very slight operational yield increases due to the introduction of GMO crops in the US. But they don't have any traits on the market that can increase intrinsic yield. He explains the problem with trying to do that, specifically recent obstacles to realizing the company's claim that they can 'get more out of every raindrop':
... 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. ...
Gurian-Sherman also details more of the things that can go wrong when trying to boost yield through adjusting complex, multi-variable traits. There are often unintended consequences, such as the increased lignin production in the cell walls of Bt corn plants. Lignin isn't harmful, to my knowledge, but it's not edible either to us or the majority of microorganisms, so it would probably take longer to break down.
What would the effects be of having corn residue that's less digestible to the soil microfauna? I don't know, though it could conceivably reduce biodiversity and the available food supply for communities of organisms that make soil healthy. It might considerably alter the makeup of soil ecosystems by favoring different microbes, or not have any effects.
Though it would be nice if we could know for sure. Especially nice if our food was labeled so that we knew if we were participating in the experiment.
World According to Monsanto, pt 9, Contamination
Published July 02, 2009 @ 08:30AM PT
A traditional Mexican corn farmer speaks in this portion of the "World According to Monsanto" documentary about the transgenic corn conquest of the ancient home of corn and the center of its greatest biodiversity: "... If they succeed, we'll be dependent on multinationals. We'll be forced to buy the fertilizer and insecticides they sell, because without them, their corn won't grow. Whereas the local corn grows very well without fertilizer or herbicide. Look at it, it's very beautiful. ..."
Now that NAFTA has made import controls on artificially cheap US corn difficult, and as much US corn contains transgenic traits, it's been impossible to keep contamination of this wind-pollinated plant at bay. Even in fields where farmers have been saving their own seed and sharing only with neighbors who do the same for centuries.
Beetles and Monoculture
Published June 30, 2009 @ 07:39PM PT
Julian Siddle of the BBC doesn't seem aware that a pine beetle infestation has already spread to the United States, devastating forests all the way into southern California, but nonetheless provided some interesting reporting on how Canada is addressing the pine beetle decimation of their forests and the environmental circumstances shaping their thinking on the matter:
... Cold winters usually kill off the beetle larvae, but the region has been warmer than usual in recent years.
... Without interference from man, mature lodge pole pine would be regularly destroyed by forest fires. But, [Staffan Lindgren, professor of entomology at the University of Northern British Columbia,] explained, the species has evolved to use fire to aid regeneration.
... The damage caused by the beetle, combined with the downturn in the demand for wood due to the global recession, has brought about a rethink on forest policy in British Columbia.
Mixed forests, rather than monocultures, are now seen as healthier both for the trees and other plant and animal life - even though a lack of uniformity makes them more difficult to harvest. ...
First, warming temperatures have helped pests proliferate. Not only would a sufficiently cold winter kill more beetles off, but as we've covered before, insect life cycles are governed by what are called degree days. That is, they need a certain minimum heat input within their tolerable range before they can progress to the next stage of their life or reproduce. It's a fascinating biological clock mechanism that allows them to be very responsive to limiting environmental constraints.
Second, the natural cycle of ecosystem renewal and regeneration has been disrupted without adequate replacement. Having spread ourselves out so widely, and having such rigorous fire supression knowledge, we left the trees without a means to clear out the competition and literal dead wood so that new, healthy seedlings could periodically get a decent chance to establish themselves.
Third, human ecosystem management techniques have decreased biodiversity. If even one pest organism can take advantage of a fatal flaw in the dominant species, the monoculture ecosystem can collapse.
Making ecosystems work properly is hard. We don't always understand all the necessary inputs and interactions.
Though we do know of a few surefire ways to break an ecosystem, some of which we might be directly or indirectly responsible for. Global warming and the monoculture are our fault, and these stressors give an opportunistic organism like the pine beetle the chance to take over and do its worst.
In this case, it's why the western portion of North America is increasingly covered in large stands of dead kindling. In the case of our artificial agricultural ecosystems, it's why when a pest develops resistance to whatever method we're using to combat it, it can devastate food production across a wide region.
Hard to create, easier to destroy. It's going to be true of any complex system, and certainly the living systems we depend on for life support. Though we can learn to interact positively with our environment, we tamper at our peril.
(Photo credit: tomsaint11 on Flickr.)
World According to Monsanto, pt 8, Control
Published June 27, 2009 @ 08:58AM PT
This installment starts off talking to a pair of Indian cotton farmers explaining that not only does Monsanto's Bt cotton still need to be sprayed, they can no longer find non-Bt cotton to buy. The narrator sums up:
"Today in India, Monsanto controls nearly all of the cotton seed market, forcing the locals to buy its seeds at prices four times higher than conventional varieties. Small farmers must turn to money lenders, who charge high interest rates. If the harvest is poor, it means bankruptcy."
The entire microcredit movement, started by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, tried to fix the exploitive finance infrastructure available to the poor, who tend not to have collateral or cash reserves that traditional banks are interested in. Yet even microcredit has run into trouble, as noted at Yunus' website:
BALI, July 28 - In an effort to head off a potential crisis in the fast-expanding microfinance industry, its leaders are adopting global truth-in-lending standards and creating a system for comparing loan terms offered by competing lenders. To manage the effort, a new self-monitoring organization, MicroFinance Transparency, is being set up as the industry's policeman. The goal is to prevent companies from taking advantage of poor people with high interest rates and misleading credit offers.
The initiative was announced on July 28 at a microcredit conference in Bali by Chuck Waterfield, a professor at Columbia University who spearheaded the initiative, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who launched the microcredit revolution in Bangladesh 30 years ago with his Grameen Bank. "Microfinance emerged as a struggle against loan sharks, so we don't want to see new loan sharks created in the name of microcredit," Yunus tells BusinessWeek.
If the industry doesn't curtail abuses and confusion, it faces the prospect of government crackdowns and donor funds drying up. Since Yunus pioneered the idea of lending small amounts of money to poor people without demanding collateral, the phenomenon has spread worldwide. These days, thousands of organizations are making loans to tens of millions of borrowers—usually to help them set up or expand small businesses. ...
As the video segment goes on to note, the introduction of patented seeds sent farmer suicide numbers way up. In an interview with Navdanya founder, Vandana Shiva, she points out that the biotech firms are looking to introduce patented genes into all the seeds they sell, getting everyone used to the idea that companies can have total control over the food supply.
Shiva says, I believe rightly, that control over the food supply is more powerful than guns.
The global poor, who also grow quite a bit of its food, are squeezed by both finance systems that abandon them to loan sharks and corporations who want to be able to charge every year for what farmers used to be able (at least sometimes, if they wanted or needed) to provide for themselves.
I don't even have to stretch my imagination to posit some dire result. The suicide rate among Indian farmers has already increased dramatically.
In response, Monsanto has a very cheery and inclusive mission statement. But you know what they say about good intentions.
Supper Roundup: Touch of Honey
Published June 25, 2009 @ 06:03PM PT
- Rabbi Mark Hurvitz talks about fasting for Darfur and other meaningful ways to raise awareness.
- "The End of the Line", a documentary about the rapid disappearance of the world's fish due to overconsumption is good, says Twilight Greenaway, but never really calls on us to take the obvious step of eating less seafood.
- I really enjoyed this informative tribute to feminist and organic gardener, Eleanor Perenyi, by regina.
- Jill Richardson alerts us to the fact that 41,000 lbs of ground beef has been recalled. The beef was produced in late April, which, as you may realize, was about two months ago.
- Ali S continues following the very bad situation of US dairy producers.
