FOOD SECURITY, part 1 of 4: Production
Food security is a topic that has received increasing coverage in the media and increasing interest among the public over the last decade or so. While each of us has an opinion on what food security is, there have been some attempts to define it in a way that can be studied and that can ensure that we are all talking about more or less the same thing. Generally, it is defined as a situation in which “… all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life.” (International Food Policy Institute, https://www.ifpri.org/topic/food-security) Despite the dryness of the definition, food security is presently a pretty sexy topic, with people new to the subject expressing great dismay over the fragility of the system, while some of us who have been concerned about it for years tend to yawn and say, “Yeah, where have you been?”
The recent supply chain shake-ups caused by Covid and the Ukraine war may have brought home to readers that food production and distribution is a very fragile system. The worldwide wheat shortage that is the result of the war in Ukraine has captured media attention. The dreadful supermarket shooting in Buffalo, NY recently brought to light part of the food security issue that few people have ever even thought of, except those who live with it daily.
Although food security or the lack of it is expressed differently in different places and times, there are three pillars of food security that I contend will apply pretty much everywhere. These are production, availability, and cost. I want to consider them one at a time over the next several months, and then try to put the whole thing together.
PRODUCTION.
This is the part of food security that is likely the most interesting to Garden Bloggers. It is one that we on this blog have a way to directly address at least on a personal basis. However, it is much bigger than just us gardeners.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this pillar of production deals with what food is produced, how it is produced, and how much. We in the US have had about the best food production in terms of raw tonnage in the world, for longer than my considerable lifetime. We’ve had our famines, for example, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Long Winter” or the horrors of the Dust Bowl. By the way, we’re still having dust storms pretty regularly, especially this year during the heat wave.
However, since WWII, we have really had more food available in the US than there are mouths to eat it. We can giggle and snark about the quality and argue about whether some edibles are really even food (sodas and chips anyone?) but the truth is, in terms of pure calories, food is produced in the US in staggering quantities.
The choice of production methods and the places where food is produced are an important part of food security. American agriculture underwent a sea change in the early 1970’s, when under Niixon the Department of Agriculture adopted policies that heavily favored large production, monocropping, and consolidation of farm systems across the country. The small diversified “Old MacDonald” farm, which had been pretty much the image of agriculture since about the beginning of the nation, was largely wiped off the map. We’ve never lost that image, though, as you will see in any toy store where it is still possible to buy little plastic barns inhabited by plastic horses, cows, sheep, and other animals, accompanied by plastic hay bales and other classic farm memes. The video game industry perpetuates this picture with Farmville and other farm simulation games that are not all that closely aligned with the reality of extensive monocrop agriculture.
There are other things that influence production as well, for instance, labor cost, weather, and the choices that customers make. But the upshot in the US at least, and arguably in the entire Western and Westernizing worlds, is that most food comes from an industrial agriculture that uses living beings - plants and animals - as the feedstock for an attenuated, brittle production system that does not have a lot of give to accommodate the unexpected.
Disasters are part of farm production. Whenever there is a big weather event, some of the media will discuss somewhere how this will impact the food supply for Americans, or maybe for people in some other country if a reporter happens to be present. Floods in the Mississippi Valley? Watch for sweet corn prices to skyrocket and meat prices to go through the roof. Avian flu? Well, forget about that big chicken fest you were planning for the Fourth of July. War halfway around the world? Look for the cost of grain to go into orbit, and with that the cost of almost everything else.
More subtly, though, we are at and possibly have passed a turning point in production capacity. The “Green Revolution” of the early 1970’s brought pesticides and artificial fertilizers to the world, and alleviated hunger in many places where famine had been a regular occurrence. It truly was a revolution. It also contained the seeds of its own demise.
Soil destruction and depletion have been among the most devastating unintended consequences of industrial food production. The first noticeable problem was the appearance of pesticides in the food chain, followed quickly by disappearance of pollinators, soil blowing away and the destruction of croplands. In some places, especially parts of the Great Plains, as much as 12 feet of good topsoil have blown away since the advent of first, early industrial farming, and later, by large monoculture farming. I have read of a number of researchers at universities, and personally know one or two, who were told to drop their alternative-farming research or risk getting fired because the big fertilizer companies threatened to cut off funding for research.
Emerging conservation methods are now being applied to production in the US and other Western countries, and people are beginning to understand the value of some of the farming methods that were considered pretty fringe twenty or thirty years ago. Some of these methods are rather illusory. “No-till agriculture” is one. It has been touted as a way to keep from disturbing soil structure and it usually does help some. In this kind of farming, the soil remains largely undisturbed. Farmers plant cover crops to keep the soil in place during winter and other fallow periods, and shortly before planting the crop seed, the cover crops are killed off along with any weeds that might be along for the ride. The crop seed is drilled into the ground, rather closely spaced. Weeds really don’t have a chance. The lack of tillage - turning the soil before planting - keeps most old weed seeds well below the depth at which they can germinate efficiently.
So what’s not to like? In a word, ROUNDUP, or glyphosate, and related herbicides. The killing off of weed and cover crops is accomplished by treating them with this dreadful, long-lived chemical or one of its close relatives. Glyphosate is believed by many respected researchers to be toxic to humans, animals, pollinators, and plants that are not genetically modified to resist its poisons. Moreover, if “roundup ready” genetics stray into neighboring fields, the farmers whose plants are pollinated by these GMO’s can find themselves liable for some pretty hefty fines for patent violation.
There is a movement, still nascent, to employ other, less industrial and more holistic, kinds of food crop production. The “Permaculture” movement, whose adherents refer to themselves as “Permies,” seeks to grow food plants in ways that disturb the natural soil as little as possible.
Very little about Permaculture resembles the classic farm with its rectangular fields, straight rows, and acres of a single crop. If you don’t know what you are looking at, a Permaculture farm can look like a disorganized jungle. It isn’t, really, but it does take some knowledge of botany and a lot of patience to build one of these installations. There are a number of books on the subject, with “Gaia’s Garden” probably the best known. The principles of permaculture can readily be applied to very small farms and home gardens, but there are significant difficulties with scaling up for the kind of production that modern society needs and expects.
There are a number of riffs on this theme.“Hugelkultur” is one, in which large amounts of carbon-bearing plant waste (up to and including logs!) are buried in the ground, and truck crops planted right on top of them.
Related to this is the “food forest,” a kind of elaborate intercropping system in which companion plants are situated here and there in plant neighborhoods that support each plant. These systems are much gentler on the soil and have a lot of promise, but they are labor intensive.
I have fooled around with hugelkultur a little bit (see the picture at the top of this essay) and I was extremely impressed with the results, but I don’t have the workforce to build and maintain the “hugels” (literally, heaps of wood waste and soil) that sustain such excellent produce.
A nearby old-line commune has done much more with this general idea, using the Japanese method of completely natural farming devised by Masanobu Fukuoka, called “The One Straw Revolution.” They feed a membership of about 40 souls, all living a (mostly) vegetarian life, with this method of farming. The commune is in its second generation, so they must be doing something right.
And taking a step to the side, the innovative and increasingly popular methods of farming livestock promulgated by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia have had a significant effect on livestock production generally and specifically on small livestock production. Almost everyone has heard of chicken tractors by now, and the moveable paddocks that allow pasture regeneration that Salatin pioneered have more than demonstrated their ability to regenerate soil where it has been depleted for centuries. (A word of caution: Salatin is a brilliant farmer and a willing teacher, but is also a strong religious conservative and libertarian. Read his books for the agriculture, not the politics.)
Here are some pictures of a small10-chicken tractor and the White Brahma ladies who live in it. It has wheels on one end and a set of nest boxes for them to lay in and to take shelter in bad weather. There is a handle behind the nest boxes that we can use to lift the tractor and drag it on its wheels to new, fresh pasture for the chickens to enjoy. The yolks of the eggs from these chickens are such an intense yellow that they seem almost fluorescent. The blue tarp goes on when the sun is intense.
Other ways of producing food outside the industrial farming sector include subsistence fishing, hunting and gathering, and of course, gardening. Subsistence is still a very important part of Native life here in Alaska. The State has recognized particular kinds of fishing and hunting as important cultural expressions for our Native citizens. Traditional fish weirs and fish wheels can be found in almost every salmon stream, and many Native villages take a few weeks away at the coast or river shoreline to collectively catch and process enough salmon for the entire village to use during the rest of the year.
Non-Natives also have a subsistence fishery, the three-week dip-net season, in which you can stick a five-foot-wide hoop with a net on it into a stream of migrating salmon, and if the fish gods like you, you can get a fish or two. There are limits, 20 fish for the head of household and an additional ten per family member. That means 50 fish for a mom, dad, and two kids. That is a heck of a lot of salmon! I have seen families with six or seven kids set up processing lines on the beach during dip-net time, putting up filet after filet to keep the family going all winter.
Berry picking has its own season. I have done that both in Alaska, though not much, and in Iceland where I lived for about ten years long ago. It is comforting to have a freezer compartment full of blueberries, or a cupboard full of jam. Most of the people I know do devote a couple Sundays late in the summer to go gather berries for winter treats. Many fewer gather other edibles that grow wild, such as sorrel, dandelion, fiddleheads, fireweed, and spruce buds. Those that do generally process them into jellies or other specialties for the tourist market.
Hunting is of course another avenue to food production, but it is so much more closely allied to sport than to food that I find myself being a little dismissive. I do know people for whom a moose or caribou in the freezer is a necessary part of preparing for winter, but I also know people who hunt just to hunt and give freezer burned meat away in the summer to people who use it as dog food. I don’t disrespect hunting per se, but I do disrespect it when it is primarily a way to show off. I have never hunted an animal for food but if I needed to, I surely would. I can raise my chickens and hope to try my hand at a meat sheep in the next year or so. I will happily leave the moose and caribou and water birds alone. Although when one neighbor referred to the migrating cranes as “steak on the wing,” I had to admit I was tempted.
And then, of course, there is gardening. I won’t insult anyone who has waded this far into this essay by cataloguing the benefits of home-gardened vegetables. There is little on earth as satisfying as biting into a sun-warmed tomato and having the juice and seeds tumble down my chin and onto my shirt. Cabbages, other brassicas, lettuce, beans, peas and peas and peas, carrots, onions, potatoes, and garlic in the hundreds are the things that grow best here, and each and every one contributes to my own food security. They are also fun to grow. A decent garden - not even a really good garden - can make a difference in an individual family’s own food security. There is even a nursing home in my town that has raised beds on tables for the long-term residents to cultivate goodies for their own dinners. Not exclusively - they buy what they need to - but the act of growing food gives meaning to lives that have sometimes become very detached from what they once were. More places need to do that.
Growing a “sustainable” agriculture
All of these alternative production methods — even hunting— have one major drawback. Compared to industrial farming, they are highly labor intensive and at least at first they are very expensive to establish. With the possible exception of back-yard gardening, they are also very expensive to maintain. One friend has an elaborate hydroponic system that takes most of his time outside of work. A very, very high-end restaurant in the next town uses hydroponics to produce its very, very expensive menu items. It’s their sales point, and I have heard that their food is pretty good stuff. It’s too expensive for my pocketbook, though.
I wish I could offer an easy solution to decentralizing food production. On my tiny farm, I am about as decentralized as it is possible to be, and I can only partly provide for Spouse and me as well as a few customers. Getting thousands of gardeners and small farmers to cooperate, get their goodies out to the public, and grow in ways that do not hurt the earth is one of those Sisyphean tasks that makes cat herding look like a piece of cake.
When I think of the fairly recent slogan, “Food for Nine Billion,” I have to despair a little that we can liberate ourselves from industrial agriculture. Here in rural South Central Alaska, there are few people and a lot of land, so becoming food-independent is at least conceivable. That said, it has not really been approached yet. I serve on our Borough’s “Resilience and Security Commission” and we are just beginning to explore whether a community garden program across this sprawling jurisdiction would be viable. But in a big city, say Philadelphia where Offspring lives, or name your favorite truly urban space, these kinds of sustainable and subsistence production are just beginning to become viable. We read of successful urban farms here and there but there are not nearly enough of them. When that - um, person - shot up the supermarket in Buffalo, an entire neighborhood was cut off from its food supply. I hope that one outcome of that tragedy is something like a neighborhood garden movement, but I have heard nothing about that in the news and don’t expect to.
However, urban farming is getting recognized as one way to enhance food production at a sustainable, small, and local scale. This really is good news. Check out the Grants for Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production on the USDA Farm Services Agency website for your state (this link is to Pennsylvania’s program). This program began in 2021, and with only a little luck will both help to green up cities, and to make food available to people who don’t have easy access to it.
I will deal more with availability in the next installment in this series on food security. There is at least as much to say about food processing and food distribution as there is about food production. After all, it doesn’t really matter how food is produced, or how much is produced, if it is not available to those who need it. Food marketing, food waste, and the political decisions that go into food distribution, are crucial parts of this complex and fascinating subject.