Can You Truly Buy Organic at Walmart?

A Slate article argues that Whole Foods is losing its edge in organics, due to the competition from Walmart.  Maybe it's time to sell my Whole Foods stock?  If the difference(s) between organic and non-organic apparent to our senses are most evident in the label, maybe Walmart can win this fight.  Meanwhile there's a fight over organic certification.

Can you have industrial organic agriculture?    Or how about this startup aiming for a substitute for eggs? Is this the point where the food movement and the environmental movement follow different paths? (I see they're selling through Whole Foods!)

Getting Food to The People

Whatever happened to the veggie truck and the bakery truck?  An older relative of mine who used to live in the DC suburbs before the war (WWII that is) remembers being able to buy fresh vegetables from a truck and bakery goods from another truck.  I assume such service couldn't withstand the restrictions on driving during WWII and the competition from supermarkets after the war.  But maybe not.  The milkman continued to deliver in my semi-rural area even into the early '50's, and a Good Humor truck has made occasional appearances in  my Reston cul-de-sac within living memory.

I do see the food movement as trying to take us back to the 1920's, the time when farmers grew a variety of crops, there were farmers markets in cities, and nobody was obese (except William Howard Taft, Chief Justice and ex-President).  Or maybe it's a matter of the pendulum swinging: from variety to standardization and uniformity and then back again.  Certainly technology is enabling a lot of new services: car sharing, room sharing, even toilet sharing (see here).  No reason it couldn't be adapted to support delivery routes and other niche marketing devices for farm produce.

Pseudo Science and Whole Foods

As a stockholder in Whole Foods (it's done well over the last decade or so) I welcome all positive news for the company.  So I shouldn't promote this article  (Hat tip-kottke.org) which compares the pseudo-science found in the sales pitch for some WF products to creationism and wonders why crunchies get upset about the latter but not the former.

However, I like the article.  It's always good to mock oneself.

Where Do Farmers Come From?

Seems to me that the conventional wisdom is that farmers inherit, that the son (almost always the son) inherits the farm and that's where farmers come from.  I say "conventional wisdom" although I really mean the presumption in history.  Once it was true, of course.  If 90-95 percent of the population is farmers, as in colonial America, then inheritance is the logical answer.

The economists had the concept of the "agricultural ladder", where a man worked his way up from day labor to sharecropper to renter to owner.  That may have worked in the 19th century, but I think maybe its prevalence is overestimated.  In the case of my family, my paternal great grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my father all moved onto farms aided by money from other occupations or sources (preaching, carpentry, and family, respectively).  That's a small sample but it's easy for historians to overlook, because there's no statistics to prove or disprove this.

Today it seems that there's a reasonable flow of people from other occupations into agriculture, particularly the "food movement" end of agriculture: the organic farmers, the community-supported agriculture, the niche products of wine, goat cheese, semi-exotic crops.

This interview with an organic farmer in Grist is interesting, covering many aspects of modern food movement farming.  Implicitly it's directed towards people coming to farming, not inheriting farming.  There was also a recent article in the NYTimes on the graying of the organic movement, which made the point that children of some people who came to organic in the 60's and 70's had no interest in continuing on their parents path.

GMO Q and A

I'm usually, not always but usually, opposing the crunchies and the food movement.  But this assessment of GMO varieties strikes me as solid.  And his recommendation for labeling GMO's, which I disagree with, may in fact end up as the only practical way to go.  After all, if everything we eat in the US is labeled "GMO", then nothing is.

Is BLS Missing the Food Movement?

Government Executive has a piece on the Bureau of Labor Statistics predictions of job growth by occupation over the next 10 years.  It's interesting, but BLS projects that jobs in agriculture will shrink (-3.4 percent), the only occupation for which that's true.  However, the piece revisits the predictions from 2002.  It turns out they had predicted a 2 percent drop in ag jobs, but the reality was a 7.4 percent increase!

That might tie into the increase the Ag census has seen in the number of farms, which in turn might be driven by the popularity of organic and niche farm products, otherwise known as the food movement.  I can see it growing, particularly as Whole Foods (we own shares) does more linking with local producers and moves into smaller cities, like Boise, Idaho. 

Community Gardeners Are No Angels

Grist links to an article on some problems some community gardens face.  Our garden too has locks on the gates and people complain of stolen produce and tools. 

Yale Foodie Meets "Real Farmers"

The Yale Sustainable Food Project has an organic operation at Yale.  It's been going for several years (I keep following it thinking the student enthusiasm will wane, but it hasn't).

In this post, a Yale foodie meets up with a Farm Bureau summer legislative picnic.  Sounds as if both sides learned a bit.

Broccoli and Industrial Farming

NYTimes Magazine has an article on broccoli,partly discussing efforts to make eating broccoli attractive, partly discussing a farmer in upstate New York:

The farm that he runs with his three brothers and one of their sons is an example of the kind of nonindustrial farm that’s necessary in a revamped vision of American food production and consumption. Last year, Reeves turned out 420,000 pounds of tomatoes, 65,000 pounds of strawberries and 2.4 million ears of sweet corn. And while they have a nice little farm stand just outside the small town of Baldwinsville, with a quaint patch of pick-your-own organic blueberries behind the sales shed, they mostly sell their crops to big grocers, including Tops, Price Chopper, Wegmans and, biggest of all, Walmart.  [emphasis added]

As I wrote in a comment on the article, the food movement tends to label farming operations they don't like as "industrial farming" and "corporate agriculture".  It's not clear to me whether the three brothers are a partnership or corporation but here's the website

Farmers Didn't Improve Their Fields Until the 20th Century?

One meme of a few in the food movement, Prof. Pollan I'm looking at you, is farmers began industrial agriculture in the 20th century, specifically when nitrates left over from the military started to be used on our fields.  (That's my memory of Omnivore's Dilemma.)

Low-Tech Magazine has a long post on lime kilns  (all that rain in the British Isles tended to acidify the fields, thus creating a demand for lime to counter it).   Wikipedia cites usage of lime for agricultural purposes in the 13th century.  It's easy to underestimate the brains of our ancestors.

I've memories of our whitewashing the stable walls, and using lime on the concrete behind the cows to keep it dry and prevent the cows from slipping.

Weather in Hell: Cooling?

Today the Post runs an article written by Jane Black, whom I ordinarily consider to be one of the food movement, which treats a big(!) industrial (!) Minnesota farmer who grows genetically engineered crops(!).  And it's favorable(!), or at least understanding.  In part it's because he's tried other crops and other niches, in part because he cares for his soil, and mostly because the Minnesota Sustainable Ag organization praises him.

One thing I wish she'd addressed: she describes him as "precisely" applying fertilizer, but without specifying how the reader doesn't know whether it's part of "precision agriculture" (which can be defined as replacing the footsteps of the farmer with the memory of the computer).

Stop the Presses: Foodie Says Not All Industrial Food Is

Evil!!  Mark Bittman, the NYTimes resident foodie, has a piece with that title.  He finds some virtue in the canned tomatoes produced by a California grower in Yolo County and canned by a co-op.

The grower is: "

Rominger Brothers Farms is a progressive, diversified family farm and ranch located north of Winters, California. Brothers Rick and Bruce Rominger are fifth-generation Yolo County farmers. They produce many different crops using organic and conventional techniques, including winegrapes, processing tomatoes, rice, wheat, corn, safflower, sunflower, onions, alfalfa and oat hay. As stewards of the land, Bruce and Rick are committed to growing crops in ways that protect the environment, such as minimizing the use of crop protection materials, using drip irrigation to conserve water and using sheep to graze crop residue."

They've 6,000 acres, 40 employees, grow 80 acres of tomatoes and hope to clear $500 an acre. Best I can tell the tomatoes aren't organic.

Bittman's impressed that the canned tomatoes taste better than fresh supermarket ones, but I wonder whether he did a taste test controlling for salt levels.  But still, I have to give him credit for having an open mind.

He does end with a plea for more unionization (though the co-op is unionized) and/or upping the minimum wage.  How he reconciles that with the acknowledgement that " the processed tomato market is international, with increasing pressure from Italy, China and Mexico..." I don't know. 

A side note--the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton era was Richard Rominger; I wonder if there's any relationship?

Newby Farmers in California

This NYTimes article from yesterday describes a couple going into farming in California.  300 acre farm.

The farm, which is about 40 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, cost $3.9 million, but the Smiths were able to get an open-space easement, financed through county sales tax initiatives, that returned $2.2 million, on the condition that their land never be developed. But with all the other start-up costs (infrastructure, machinery and initial livestock outlay), they still needed to borrow $5 million.

The couple want to emulate Polyface Farm (made famous by Prof. Pollan). So they have a staff of around a dozen.  I hope a few of those dozen know something about agriculture and something about business.

Schadenfreude Towards Locavores

Schadenfreude means enjoying others' misfortune.  I find I enjoy it when people are very self-righteous and self-confident, and then stumble, as in the case of locavores who enthusiastically went into the raising of backyard chickens.

Two articles reporting on people who don't know what to do when hens stop laying eggs.

RSS Feeds and GMO Technology

Just trying to get ready for the end of Google Reader, meaning I'm looking at some stuff which has remained unread. 

Predictably some of the food movement have attacked the award of the prize to Monsanto scientist, claiming that the technology doesn't increase food supply or help with nutritious or sustainable food.  Accepting that position for sake of argument, genetic modification will still prove its worth, as in this case of obtaining resistance to wheat rust.

Crunch[ie] Dairy the Demeter Way

This article at Treehugger describes a German dairy farm (mostly) which adheres to Demeter standards.  Amusing throughout, particularly this bit:

Our guide explains that the hollow horns remaining after a cow's passing are filled with manure, and buried underground through the winter. The composting manure gathers cosmic rays in the cold season, and in spring the mixture is dug up and the manure crumbled into the mixing tanks.A special process of mixing creates a vortex that distributes the cosmic energy in the correct manner (the view from the platform is reported to put the mixer in the right mindset during the hour-long mixing process, but more importantly the elevation obviates the need for pumps, which might disturb the cosmic energy)

 And here I always thought my German relatives/ancestors were practical, hard-headed types.

An oddity: it sounds as if the cows are never slaughtered, but yet they raise chickens for eggs and meat.

Depleting the Soil--It's Not Astrophysics

This post at Time/World beats the drum about our broken food system:

some experts fear the world, at its current pace of consumption, is running out of useable topsoil. The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with TIME, talked to University of Sydney professor John Crawford on the seismic implications soil erosion and degradation may have in the decades to come.

Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/#ixzz2IXgCD64m

Prof. Crawford has this background: "John Crawford was awarded the prestigious Judith and David Coffey Chair in Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Sydney in 2008. He holds a BSc in Physics from the University and Glasgow and a PhD in Theoretical Astrophysics from the University of London."

I'm being a bit hard on him.  

Corporate Agriculture Is a No-No

The foodies distaste for corporate industrial agriculture is perhaps the most recent manifestation of our American populist hatred of corporations.  As witness this article and Rural Blog post on already existing restrictions on corporations in farming.  9 states have such restrictions.

It's All Power--per Pollan

From the NY Times Magazine, Prof. Pollan writes on the referendum in California to require the labeling of food with genetically modified organisms as ingredients.

This paragraph I found astonishing, but remember that the good professor is not one of my favorite people (for some reason he and Ralph Reed get up my nose, as the Brits would say);

Americans have been eating genetically engineered food for 18 years, and as supporters of the technology are quick to point out, we don’t seem to be dropping like flies. But they miss the point. The fight over labeling G.M. food is not foremost about food safety or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The fight is about the power of Big Food. Monsanto has become the symbol of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of pesticides on ever-expanding monocultures; and the monopolization of seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of humanity depends.

Am I being unfair to summarize it as saying: "it's not a health issue, it's power"--even though there's no food safety issue, we, the food movement, need to show our power?  Would the professor like to see other movements use the same logic; don't argue the merits, just show you're more powerful than your opponent?

That Food We Waste--the Cows Eat It?

CNN has a report on farmers feeding candy to their cows, given the high price of grain.  They play it for laughs, but the main stream media and food movement have made a big deal out of all the food we waste.  I wonder how much of it, particularly from supermarkets, ends up in pigs and cows?

I know a couple of bloggers who raise pigs who feed such things (mostly dairy-oriented, like butter milk etc.).  Does that constitute waste in the statistical business?  I suspect probably it does, but am not sure.  Does it constitute real waste--not to me.