Bias is a strange and often subtle thing. Green America is a great publication promoting saner paradigms for healthy alternatives in a seriously unsustainable world. They are supported in large part by a bunch of great companies committed to the principles of social justice including environmental stewardship. They are not, for the most part supported by small family farms. Nonetheless, they do their best to honor these businesses and acknowledge their importance, but perhaps a bit of bias has slipped into their assessment of the choices between locally grown and organic.
In this linked article writer Tracy Fernandez Rysavy says, “The local food movement isn’t just about food miles—it’s about the importance of asking questions about where your food comes from, and really connecting with your food and how it impacts your community. It’s a way to break free from corporate agriculture—and its chemicals and processed corn and soy end products—and support family farmers.”
As much as this statement seems to “get it” the article sort of belies the sentiment. It presents the whole local verses organic as an either/or proposition, which could not be further from the case. She lays out the arguments against chemical farming as if small local “non-organic” farms are using the same practices that factory farms are using. That simply is not the case. More often than not the local farmer is working to get organic certification or they have just given up on a certification process that has been co-opted by organic agribusiness. Regardless of their position, small farms cannot use the level of chemicals that large farms do simply because the cost of those chemicals are paid in an economy of scale that only exists on factory farms.
But as Rysavy does a good job of pointing out, one of the most important aspects of local farmers is your ability to talk to the farmer and know what you are getting in your food. If you demand absolute organic certification, including the many acceptable yet way less than healthy options permitted within that certification, you will find many local farmers who can provide that. And if you want a little more reasoned, less scripted approach to food production you can also find that. My experience is that there are few people who know more about the biology of food than the folks with dirt under their fingernails at your local farmers market.
Unfortunately, in her discussion Rysavy does not make this distinction and implies that a “non-organic” local farm is the same as a factory farm when it comes to chemical use.
One of the really wonderful things that we see happening is the cooperation of small local farms and some of the smaller certified organic farms. A good example of this is sort of leadership comes from my friends at Saw Mill Hollow Family Farm. This is a certified organic Aronia Berry farm that is working hand in hand with their community and area farmers to help challenge the practices of the huge chemical drenched farms that surround them in Iowa. Vaughn Pittz is a former Kraft foods executive who began working long ago on this American wonder fruit. He is now a champion of getting this plant into the fields of farms as a means of reducing or eliminating chemical dependence. Along with his wife Cindy and Son Andrew, Pittz is a revolutionary working with a new breed of plant and a new breed of farmer to provide an alternative to our dependence on factory foods.
Though somewhat of a tangent, this is a design issue in at least two respects. 1) Sustainability is a social design issue. 2) Something as intimate as food has to be a design issue in our homes. How we select, grow and store our food are issues of residential design. Granted, very little falls outside of my definition of design. That is sort of the point.
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