Haspel on Greenberg's Mistaken Times Op-Ed

Tamar Haspel should be followed by anyone interested in food policy. Here she offers good criticism of a Paul Greenberg op-ed in the Times.

I do want to comment on Greenberg's idea that specialty crops should return to the Midwest from the South and the coast.  The problem I see is that the South and coasts (and Central and South America) have natural advantages for growing fruits and vegetables--specifically their growing seasons are longer and/or opposite to the season in the central U.S.  Transportation, specifically the interstate highway system and air, has obliterated the advantages of growing locally. 

Vertical/Indoor Farms

Here's a Fortune article on an outfit in NJ.

Here's a Technology Review piece on farming in shipping containers.

It's possible that the advent of LED lights makes such farming economically feasible, feasible at least if the produce gets a premium from being "local" and "organic".  USDA has agreed that they may be labeled "organic", though the original organic community does not like the idea at all. 

Call me old, I am, but I don't call these "farms" or "farming".

The Future of Agriculture: Wired Tomatoes

This post at Technology Review describes the potential for really precision agriculture--essentially applying the "internet of things" to tomato growing in New England.  Did you know New England tomatoes are different than tomatoes grown elsewhere (as in warmer climates)?  There's potential for using technology to monitor growing tomatoes .

I suspect this represents one set of developments in future agriculture, where farmers lose their rednecks (I've got one--from bending over in the garden) by much more intensive use of technology. There will be a further bifurcation of farmers:

So on one hand we'll have the tech-farmers, investing more capital into much more precise control of growth.  I'd count the vertical farmers of leafy greens as other examples.  This agriculture will be seen as much less "natural" than today's.

On the other hand we'll have the artisan farmers, who will be more organic and grow more diverse crops (heirloom tomatoes, etc.)

Haspel on Vertical Farming

I respect Tamar Haspel's work, so I buy her conclusions on the tradeoffs involved with indoor, vertical farming.  Bottomline: because of the energy involved, the carbon footprint of current day vertical farms (of lettuce) is much bigger than for more conventional operations.  Efficiencies might import, and the lettuce produced has some advantages.

I've mocked vertical farming before, but that's the plans relying on sunlight.  I'd observe that growing lettuce is, I'd guess, the choosing the easiest path for artificial light farming.  And while these operations fit the locavore template, they don't fit the organic template.

The Value of Urban Farming

Seems to be not the tangible produce grown, but the intangibles, the community building David Brooks would like to see. Brad Plumer reports on a study:

" Urban farming likely won't ever provide cities with all that many calories. And the environmental advantages are … debatable. But urban farms can provide a bunch of other neat benefits, from bolstering local communities to (sometimes) encouraging healthier diets. They can also give city-dwellers a better appreciation of how our food system works, which is less nebulous than it sounds."

Like many crunchy things, urban farming tends to be more white and rich than black and poor. Strictly speaking it's not locavore per se, but I'll tag it that.

Organic Does Not Equal Locavore

A Bloomberg piece on the importing of organic grain from Romania and India.  It's certainly not energy-efficient.

This is related to the next post on Costco springing for the costs of converting farmland to organic.  I'd interpret both as saying the price premium for organic is promising enough to warrant these measures.  I'd also guess there will be at some point down the road an overbuilding of organic capacity, because farmers usually overshoot their market corrections.

Local Food Is Not Organic,Necessarily

The New York Times had an article the other day on a "vertical farming" project in Newark, NJ.  An excerpt:

Unlike urban vegetable gardens of the past that took advantage of empty lots or evolved in rooftop greenhouses, AeroFarms employs so-called aeroponics and stacks its produce vertically, meaning plants are arrayed not in long rows but upward. Because the farming is completely indoors, it relies on LED bulbs, with crops growing in cloth and fed with a nutrient mist.

 I've been critical of some vertical farming concepts, particularly the ones which rely on sunshine and ignore shade, or use fluorescent lights.  LED's are more efficient than fluorescents so it's possible that such setups are energy-efficient when you add in the energy savings on transporting produce to market.

Meanwhile Sec. Vilsack is pushing local food:

Local food gives consumers a chance to know the farmers producing their food, to access fresher food and an opportunity to keep food dollars in the local economy, he said. In short, “local and regional food systems create a better connection between people who produce and people who eat.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/agriculture-secretary-tom-vilsack-locally-grown-food-116830.html#ixzz3X2JkLXKm

 But the organic types have reservations:

A definition for local would help organic farmers make the case for why their often more expensive produce is worth the cost, argues Laura Batcha, director of the Organic Trade Association.
“There is definitely an issue with the public differentiating between local and organic,” Batcha said. “In many cases, both things happen together … but the public, I think, assumes that local is organic.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/agriculture-secretary-tom-vilsack-locally-grown-food-116830.html#ixzz3X2K3LQGQ

Locavore and Organic

Technology Review has a piece on LED lights in greenhouses.  Includes this surprising factoid:

Consequently, the number of commercial greenhouses and the area they occupy is rocketing. In the Netherlands, for example, greenhouses occupy around 0.25 per cent of the land area of the entire country.

 It reports on a study showing LED lights would be much cheaper than sodium lights, with the interesting possibility of tailoring the color spectrum output to match plant characteristics--certain plants use some parts of the spectrum and not others, etc.

I wonder whether greenhouse plants can be organic, if grown under unnatural lights.

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.

Peak Oil, Not So

Sharon Astyk writes well.  She does locavore/food movement things, while raising a family and taking in foster children. She and her husband have big hearts, for which she deserves much praise. She's also  a peak oiler, who has in the past predicted gloom and doom: our economy is falling apart, running out of oil, etc. etc. This year though she's decided not to make predictions.

I think this is a sign of the wisdom which comes with age.  I'm sure wisdom comes with age, it doesn't have much else to recommend it. 

The Scarcity of Gardeners

The Times has an interesting piece today on the scarcity of urban gardeners, at least in certain parts of New York City. The writer visits a number of the urban gardens in the city and interviews a number of the gardeners and others, including a retired urban extension worker from Cornell.  The pattern seems to be that some gardens thrive, others fall into disuse, partially depending on the surrounding area and partially depending on the interest and energy of a dedicated gardener. 

But John Ameroso, the Johnny Appleseed of the New York community garden movement, suspects that the number of present-day gardens — around 800 — may be half what it was in the mid-1980s.

In his long career as an urban extension agent for Cornell University, Mr. Ameroso, 67, kept a log with ratings of all the plots he visited. “I remember that there were a lot of gardens that were not in use or minimally used,” he said. “Into the later ’80s, a lot of these disappeared or were abandoned. Or maybe there was one person working them. If nothing was developed on them, they just got overgrown.”

Seems to me the article undermines any assumption there's a long waiting list for urban garden plots in the city, some areas have waiting lists, some don't. The enthusiasm for gardening is similar to other enthusiasms, sometimes hot, sometimes cold.  It's not a firm foundation for redoing the basis on which America grows its food.

(In my own community garden in Reston, there is a waiting list.  Reston has expanded the area in which I garden twice now.  But Restonites are likely to be enthusiastic, at least enough of them to fill a waiting list.  We're a cosmopolitan bunch, Korea, Vietnam, Africa, Latino, some probably suffering from nostalgia for their childhood, like me, and some falling prey to the current fad.)

Locavores and Vulnerability

I mentioned the storm which hit the Mid-Atlantic states had gone through Reston.  The local Safeway got its power back yesterday, but its stock of perishable food, particularly frozen food, is still being rebuilt.  I think it reflects the extent to which the food chain has adopted the "just-in-time" logic of Japanese car makers from the 1980's, which was a hot meme in the 1990's. 

The discussion in the Post of the impact of the storm included observations from local vendors of high-end meat, including one perhaps apocryphal statement that his butcher had 80 head of cattle which he had to dispose of.  At first it sounded unlikely to me, but thinking about the practicalities makes it more likely.  Consider an operation where a butcher/meat packer buys cattle.  He's set up to move the cattle from the feed lot/ranch to his slaughterhouse where they'll be killed and cut into products he can ship out to his stores.  He knows how much meat his stores can take; he knows how long his refrigerated trucks will take to get the products to the store; he knows how long it will take to slaughter and butcher the animals. 

Simple economics means he should speed the animals through as fast as possible; that's good for the bottomline, reduces the amount of capital needed, and incidentally probably serves the animals well. So what happens when the storm comes through and the stores call up and say, no deliveries until we notify you we've got power back?  He's probably got no storage, no way to hold inventory.  He maybe could load up his trucks and keep their refrigeration units running, but that won't hold much surplus. If he's got 80 head of cattle in the lot, he's not set up to feed and care for the animals, certainly not humanely.

There's a Chaplin or Lucille Ball short where one end of an assembly line stops and the rest keeps going--that's what can happen here.

The point of my reflections is this: though I often question the advocates of the food movement, they've got one thing right:  our modern integrated food production and distribution system is efficient, but it's vulnerable.  Simply because of its integration, a disruption wreaks more damage than with the locavore system. 

Pot, Locavores, and the Farm Bill

Since the beginning, the farm bill has sought to protect farmers from price risk and weather risk, the risk of low prices through overproduction and the risk of low production from.bad weather.  The methods provided in the laws have varied, including cartels, supply management, crop insurance and disaster payments, all of which are conditioned on the basic fact that in a free market, farmers are price takers, mostly at the mercy of those who buy from them.

Because marijuana is illegal, you don't see a lot of discussion about its economics, so I've only vague impressions to go on. (See this PBS piece which looks at costs and volume.)Because pot is illegal, its dealers are insulated from market pressures: once they've established themselves in an area, they tend to have a relatively stable monopoly.  So the tendency is for basically stable networks of growers-dealers-buyers, meaning prices are pretty stable. (Can I find a parallel with contract growers of poultry, pork, etc., which also have stable networks?)  And because pot is illegal, there's a high entry cost for growers. That's what "illegal" means. But it also means that "weather risk" can extend to "law risk"--the chances of a bust.

My impression is that the importation of marijuana is down, and domestic growing is up.  In that sense, the pot industry has been moving in the direction of  locavore. As "grow houses" have proliferated, it's become more localized and more production oriented, more industrial, less organic.

Comes now the legalization of "medical marijuana" (I use quotes because I think it's really a backdoor way to semi-legalize marijuana) which seems to have disrupted the pot economy, according to an article in today's NYTimes Post, for which I can't find the url. (I'll try to add it later.)

On the one hand you have competition among the vendors, both on quality and price.  On the other you have growers having problems. Bottom line is the bottom has dropped out of the price, with big repercussions on the economy of such counties as Humboldt, CA.

One wonders when pot will make it into the farm bill?

"Progressives" and "The Progressive Farmer"

Minds are funny.  I just Google+1ed a post at Casaubon's Book, something I rarely do.  (The writer Sharon Astyk is deep into the foodie movement: peak oil, locavore, sustainable, etc. but very articulate.) The post was about gay marriage, and noted the legal and property considerations involved in marriage--recommend it.  She would qualify as a political "progressive" in most people's books.

Anyway, the next post on my RSS feed was Chris Clayton's column at "The Progressive Farmer".  The conjunction of someone who's really progressive and the magazine, which isn't progressive at all, at least in the sense that some of the conservatives I follow would use it (i.e., as an epithet, a tad better than "socialist" but much worse than "liberal") struck me. 

"Progessive" as used in connection with farming used to mean the wide-awake, up-to-date farmer, someone who was on his way to being an "industrial" farmer, as the foodies would have it.  It's rather ironic to me to see the evolution of the term.

McWilliams on Animals and Local Food

James McWilliams has an op-ed in the Times on the myth of sustainable meat.

"But rotational grazing works better in theory than in practice. Consider Joel Salatin, the guru of nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to enrich his cows’ grazing lands with nutrients. His plan appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed. This common practice is an economic necessity. Still, if a farmer isn’t growing his own feed, the nutrients going into the soil have been purloined from another, most likely industrial, farm, thereby undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling."

 He's against locavores, but also against meat.

Urban Farming--in Washington

The food movement places a lot of emphasis on urban farming, usually meaning the conversion of empty lots to community gardens, though sometimes it's rooftop gardens and occasionally vertical farming. That sequence, lots, roofs, vertical, represents my degree of sympathy with it: a good deal of sympathy for lots and very little for vertical. 

Even the conversion of empty lots is a limited expedient; such lots are mostly doomed by market forces and cultural factors. Cultural factors in that a society like the English, for example, can emphasize and preserve allotment gardening. I doubt we can create such an emphasis.  Market factors in that the same forces which eliminated the 261 farmers (owners and tenants) the 1920 census found in the District of Columbia will continue to operate.  Urban land is too valuable, so I don't expect any self-sufficient farm to be created and to last in DC.  Any farming/gardening will have to be an adjunct to some bigger institution. 

Grapefruit and Locavores

My college roommate was from Hawaii, so he stayed with my family for the Christmas holiday.  His mother shipped a crate of citrus from Hawaii, meaning I learned for the first time how grapefruit should taste.  Locavores are right: fresh fruit direct to the table are the best.

Regardless, I've regularly had grapefruit halves for breakfast over the last 50 years. Why?  Grapefruit from the Safeway taste good enough; they satisfice even if they aren't the platonic ideal of grapefruit. And that's the crack in the locavore armor.  Many people develop a taste for tropical and subtropical fruit: your citrus, bananas, etc.  which most Americans cannot grow locally but which we learned to value.  That simple fact breaks the connection between place and product, so we're willing to accept the idea of fruits and vegetables being transported to the store from further and further away.  (See the history of United Fruit for how far back this goes.)

The economists would tell us it's a balance of the utility of the produce, mostly the taste, and the cost and they'd predict, rightly, that the ability to put good-enough tasting produce on the shelves of the supermarket only increases with time.

My proof: some of the best blueberries I've tasted in a good while just came from the Safeway, grown in Chile.

Lettuce Talk of Locavores

Post has an article on locally-grown lettuce which I find interesting, mostly because it includes some statistics.

The outfit produces 4,000 heads of leaf lettuce a week, every week, apparently immune to weather variations.  There may be additional outputs; it's not particularly clear. 

The lettuce in grown in 2 fancy-smancy greenhouses, very high tech with computers and stuff, which cover 12,000 square feet, which is a tad over .25 acre.  They're planning to add another greenhouse, some 20,000 square feet, which would bring them up to .75 acre.  Although they're greenhouses, consider this quote:

A computer regulates everything: the 43 high-pressure sodium lights and heater that maintain summerlike light and temperature; the shade cloths that come down at night or when it’s too sunny outside; the pH, nutrient balance and flow of the water and the water system; and carbon dioxide emitted into the air to boost growth.

 They have 12 part-time employees (retirees and housewives paid over minimum wage, plus 3 relatives of the owner-manager.

The lettuce with roots still attached sells in a clamshell for $5 a pop!!! (I'd assume they're selling to K street lobbyists, not to poor underpaid Feds.)  Not clear how much the grower gets. 


So, if we assume 5,000 a week for 50 weeks, that is 250,000.  Assume $2 to grower is $500,00; assume $4 and it's a million.  Assume the equivalent of 6 full-time employees paid $30,000 each is $180,000, leaving $320,00 for operating expenses and profit, or more.

If a population of 1 million uses a head per person per week, then it would take 200 such operations to supply, or 50 acres. So rooftop gardens could indeed supply greens for the city, assuming the residents were very well-paid.

Organic Versus Locavore

There's a tension between organic food and the locavores, a tension I see in this NYTimes article.  There's a scarcity of organic milk, particularly on the East Coast, partly because prices haven't risen high enough, partly because of the inflexibility of supply (takes 3 years for a dairy to convert to organic production), and partly because there's not enough organic grain grown in the East.  The latter is important because grain is important for milk production; cows produce much less milk if they're simply grazing pasture and eating hay.  So there's an imbalance in the food economy, an imbalance which the free market fills by transporting food/grain from distant places, but that's not something which locavores can be happy about.