Chicken Ethics

This is Harvey, our accidental Ameraucana rooster.* His life began as a "packing peanut" thrown in with a hatchery order of pullets (female chicks).

Last year, when we decided to get serious about chickens, we ordered 25 pullets from Eagledove Greenhouse, a locally-owned garden center that offers brooding services.

Since a lot of beginning chicken-keepers don't feel confident doing their own brooding (taking care of the chicks for the first few weeks of their lives, mimicking the care of a mother hen), this is a great service offered by a wonderful local business that we wanted to support. Eagledove also fed organic chick starter, which was a great bonus. Win-win, right? Supporting a local business, getting started with chickens, organic layers ready to kick-start our yard egg sideline at the tailgate market.

Here's where the story gets complicated. Our friends at Eagledove ordered our chicks from Mount Healthy, a hatchery in Ohio, who shipped the chicks via the postal service.

I admit that I chose not to look too deeply into Mount Healthy, or spend too much time thinking about what happened to all of the male chicks with the thousands of female chicks being shipped out every day. I knew it wasn't likely to be a train of thought that ended up in a happy place.

I had already been plotting out future chick orders from Sand Hill Preservation Center, which ships only "straight run" (unsexed) chicks because they are a no-kill hatchery. I remembered having heard bad things about hatchery practices and it didn't take a lot of brainpower to figure out that if Sand Hill was a "no-kill" straight run hatchery, that the alternative to "no-kill" is "kill." I was feeling kind of overwhelmed with life at the time that we decided to place our order, though, and decided for once just to go with what was easy and not spend a ton of time researching where these chickens were coming from.

One of our pullets, a lovely Silver-Laced Wyandotte

All 25 of our heritage breed chicks arrived, plus one extra. At six weeks old, these little chickens were integrated into our existing flock of 7 Buff Orpintons, and then we added 10 2-year-old Black Australorps that we bought for a good price from a neighboring farm.

At some point in the past month, I began to feel pretty confident that the extra chicken was a rooster. At the same time, I started working on our next chick order (this time we'll be ordering from Sand Hill and brooding them ourselves) and thinking more deeply about roosters.

I decided to go ahead and look behind the curtain and see how many (if any) of the big commercial hatcheries were "no-kill."

A Speckled Sussex pullet

I knew we wanted to order from Sand Hill anyhow because of their focus on heritage breed genetics. I had been reading a lot about heritage poultry and learning that the big commercial hatcheries don't pay nearly as much attention to preserving heritage breed qualities as smaller-scale heritage breeders do. In fact, many don't consider hatchery birds to meet the technical definition of "Heritage Breed." I won't go down that rabbit trail too far here, but suffice to say that just as with the definition of the word "heirloom" in the vegetable world, there's a lot of controversy about the use of the word "heritage" in the livestock world. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy is a good place to start if you're interested in that rabbit trail.

Back to the subject at hand: commercial hatcheries and their rooster practices. There is a ton of bad information out there on this subject. By "bad," I mean: incomplete, inaccurate, and outright untrue. One of the things you will find if you just start googling "no-kill hatchery" is a series of claims on various forums that various hatcheries are "no-kill." For instance, here's a post on homestead.org stating in no uncertain terms: "Both Meyer and MyPetChicken are no-kill hatcheries." The poster even goes on to explain: "This means that like most hatcheries, most of their customers want hens, not roosters. Rather than kill the roosters that they are unable to sell as day old chicks, they send them to livestock auctions."

"Wow," I thought, "could a big hatchery like Meyer really be a no-kill facility?" It turns out not so much. Following up on the homesteading.org post, I came across this grisly news story from a newspaper in Ohio (where Meyer is based): Two Ohio Hatcheries Violate Livestock Care Standards by Suffocating Chicks. I won't get into the details here, but suffice to say, it takes a high degree of animal suffering to violate the paltry standards that exist for animal welfare.

And for anyone who clicked through to the story, the next surprise is already out of the bag, but guess the name of the second Ohio hatchery cited by the state Department of Agriculture. Yep, none other than Mount Healthy. Which is where our chicks came from.

Which brings me back to Harvey. It would appear that Harvey was spared a pretty awful death (crushed and/or smothered by hundreds of other chicks stuffed alive in a garbage bag) by getting slipped in to our pullet order by an employee at Mount Healthy. I'm glad. Having him around will enable us to make more Ameraucanas without having to order from a hatchery, although our birds will surely be, like him, more along the lines of "Easter Eggers" than top-of-the-line Ameraucanas.

But of course that doesn't address the much bigger problem of roosters. Which is part of an even bigger discussion about the ethics of "extra males" in the world of animal husbandry.

Little Felix, the first goat kid born on our farm, a buckling. Our solution to the "extra males" problem in his case was a buck trade with another local farm - he'll help diversify the gene pool in their herd and little Merlin, who came to us in the trade, will help diversify ours.

It's a topic about which Sharon Astyk has written about beautifully in her post, "Blood on Our Hands: Dealing Ethically With the Problems of Husbandry". I heartily recommend reading Astyk's whole article, but will excerpt a really excellent bit here:

"But we're still a long way from fully grasping that agriculture itself is steeped in death, and that we can't escape that reality as long as we depend on it. We'd be steeped in death even if we were all to become vegans (which is unlikely in the extreme) as domesticated livestock breeds went rapidly extinct because there was no reason to raise them anymore, and we lost the sound and sight and relationship that tie us to these animals that we have chosen for domestication - and that chose us as well. Even if we were vegan we'd be steeped in death as combines behead rabbits and roll over the nests of ground nesting birds. We'd be steeped in death as we increasingly mined scarcer soil minerals that we used to get from animal manures.

The truth is, we can't get out of death - or its corollary, life. These animals we rear get to live because of what we eat as well. They get their day in the sun, their breeds continue and go forward because we eat them or their products. The truth is that there is no full escape from the problem of death here - there is only the careful consideration of the material conditions of both life and death."

A mature Black Australorp hen and other members of our flock

This discussion is important not only for people who raise chickens -- either commercially or on the backyard scale or somewhere in between (like us). We aim to have a flock of about 100 by the end of this year, so we're a little beyond the backyard scale, but certainly tiny compared to "real" chicken farmers. It's also important for people who eat eggs or chicken, especially if you're concerned about where your food comes and the ethics of animal welfare.

As backyard chicken-keeping has become increasingly popular in the past five years, people have begun raising chickens on a home scale presumably at least in part because they care about where their food comes from. I'm curious if and how this issue has been discussed in backyard chicken circles--I haven't seen it, but I have really not been deeply involved in those networks. Here's an article from The Oregonian that spells it out pretty clearly, including the responses of hatcheries to questions about the issue: As backyard chickens increase in popularity, roosters' fate is nothing to crow about.

So I end this post uncertain, just having laid some of the issues out. I'm curious to hear how other chicken-keepers have thought about these things. We'll be ordering some quantity of straight-run chicks from Sand Hill in the spring, and will likely have both roosters and pullets for sale. That said, we haven't decided if we would be willing to sell roosters to someone who's going to butcher them. I'd honestly rather do that ourselves here on the farm, where we can trust that it will be a quick, humane death. But that's a subject for another time.

*Harvey is named after Harvey Ussery, who has written eloquently on the subject of the ethics of roosters and chicken breeding, among other topics covered in great depth in his excellent book, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, which I reviewed in an earlier post. Ussery hates the use of the word "rooster" to describe male chickens - that's your teaser to entice you to read more in his book.

Winter Reading

Chalk it up to being raised by a librarian. No matter how busy, tired, or overextended I am, I'm always reading at least a book or two or five or six. Even if it is just a page or two in the last few bleary, half-conscious minutes before I fall asleep, reading happens almost every day.

Reading is sort of a basic element of life for me, like eating well or getting enough sleep. And I'm talking about reading books, though I spend plenty of time reading things on the internet tubes too of course. My bedside table has always been more of a bedside book cascade, with stacks of novels, poetry, and nonfiction piled up for my reading pleasure.

In recent years, I've read a lot more nonfiction than anything else - essays, practical guides to everything under the sun, books about politics and history and food - but fortunately my sister Mary keeps me supplied with fiction. She works at a used book store. Can you sense a theme in my family?

My mom is a retired librarian who reads voraciously. She read to us all from the time we were in utero, and someone once described entering my childhood home as "being in danger of being hit by a falling book."

Even though I've been ridiculously overextended with off-farm work these days, I've squeezed in some really satisfying reading lately.

Here are a few recent favorites.

The Resilient Gardener

Carol Deppe

I love this book. Carol Deppe's quirky, opinionated, and garden-geeky personality comes through on every page. Her informal, conversational tone and cheeky attitude make for a quick and enjoyable read. I felt like I was chatting with the author in her kitchen while she popped up some popbeans (special strains of garbanzos she's selected for their ability to pop like popcorn). Or maybe hanging out with her in her garden watching her flock of Ancona ducks chow down on banana slugs nearby.

I don't agree with all of Deppe's methods or opinions, and some of the approaches she discusses are geared toward the particular climate of the place she lives (Corvallis, Oregon). But I came away from her book with immense respect for the author's perspective. She has spent years experimenting and meticulously documenting her experiments. The level of detail in her book is amazing. I have read a lot of gardening books over the years that make vague, grand claims about various techniques and methods without getting down to brass tacks.

Khaki Campbells on our farm: slug-eaters extraordinaire....but how?

For example, I can't tell you the number of times I've heard people talk about using ducks to control slugs in the garden. But how? How do you prevent them from eating all of your greens while their hunting for slugs? How do you get them to stay in the garden if there's somewhere they'd rather be? What about their high-nitrogen manure - how do you avoid a projectile application of duck manure to every plant in the garden? Ducks in the garden are a nice idea, but as we've spent more and more time with our small flock, we've begun to question how practical the idea of using them in the garden really is.

Enter The Resilient Gardener. Deppe begins her section "Ducks for Garden Pest Control" like so: "That ducks are supreme for garden pest control is widely recognized and mentioned in many books and articles. Exactly how to use the ducks and still have a garden left afterwards never quite seems to be mentioned. This section is a summary of my experience." She describes her method of using portable fencing to create temporary duck pens adjacent to the garden or even just near the garden to control slugs. With years of experimentation and careful observation under her belt, she offers the most detailed and helpful overview of ducks in the garden that I've ever seen.

Deppe's basic premise is that we need to garden not just as a hobby but as a way of life, and as a way to prepare for hard times. She points out that many gardeners (and garden blogs and garden writers, I might add) are focused on expensive inputs, equipment, and gadgets and what I would call "glamour crops" rather than learning to grow basic, everyday food to support themselves and their communities.

She puts it this way: "Traditionally, gardeners have played a major role in sustaining themselves, their families, and their communities through hard times of many kinds. Would you be able to do likewise?"

After investigating that question herself for many years, Carol Deppe has a wealth of highly-detailed and practical information to share. From growing your own feed for chickens and ducks to soil fertility and seed-saving, The Resiliant Gardener is packed with useful information. I know I will be referring back to this book for years to come.

I also appreciate Deppe's perspective as a gluten-free gardener and her insight as a plant breeder - she manages to weave these aspects of herself into her book in a way that seems to make perfect sense. She thinks of special dietary needs, for instance, as a personal variation of "hard times" - and continually returns to the framework of preparing for hard times. She mentions climate change, peak oil, natural disasters, and economic instability, but doesn't dwell on the catastrophic possibilities.

Instead, she places her faith in gardeners:

"I believe that the potential role of gardeners...is more important today than ever before. In times past, a large portion of the population knew how to grow and preserve food and could survive on what they could grow and preserve. In the United States today, only about 2 percent of the population farms, and they farm largely in ways that are totally dependent upon imported oil and gas, electricity, irrigation, roads, national and international markets, and an intact financial and social infrastructure. In many kinds of mega-hard times, those farms would not be functional, and the knowledge of how to farm in those ways would be useless. In...the future, what food we have may be the result of the knowledge and skills of gardeners. I challenge all gardeners to fully accept their role as a source of resilience for their communities in mega-hard times, and to play and adventure in good times so as to develop the kinds of knowledge and skills that would most matter."

You can visit Carol Deppe's website for more....I just signed up for her newsletter and am looking forward to following her further adventures in resilient gardening.

A Nation of Farmers

Sharon Astyk & Aaron Newton

A related book that's been on my bedside table for about a year is A Nation of Farmers. I've been dipping into A Nation here and there over the months, but got inspired to get serious and really read it when my friends on the staff and board of the Organic Growers School started buzzing about it.

My friend Ruth Gonzalez wrote a great piece on A Nation of Farmers for the Organic Growers School e-newsletter recently with some fabulous old-timely photographs of front-yard farmers. I'll keep it brief here and refer you to Ruth's more in-depth article.

A Nation of Farmers proclaims itself "a call for more participation in the food system" and draws a clear distinction between "farming" as it is mostly practiced today and the kind of farming that the authors believe can transform our food system and thereby "stop the harm industrial agriculture is doing."

Astyk and Newton envision a food system made up of small-scale polyculture, with millions of small farms, homesteads, and gardens raising both animals and vegetables, providing for community needs. Calling to mind the image of a farmer that most children have, they point out: "What you dreamed of, if you were anything like most children, is the kind of small, mixed farm that hardly exists anymore. It would have some animals, a big garden, pasture, orchard, and fields. This is the farm of children's books, the farm of stories, and 75 years ago, this was the farm of reality. But gradually, as we all grew older, such farms disappeared from the landscape." In contrast, the authors point out wryly, "you probably didn't imagine yourself debeaking chickens, building a hog manure lagoon, or riding in a giant tractor while spraying Roundup."

The premise that the authors return to again and again is that "It turns out that the old sort of farm, the one we dreamed of as children, really is the best way to feed the world. Small-scale polyculture that mixes animals and multiple plant crops together is vastly more productive that industrial row crops."

In a way I see Deppe's Resilient Gardener and A Nation of Farmers as espousing the same message, one that's dear to my heart: gardeners can save the world. The line between a small farm and a big garden is a fine one, and I believe that Deppe's "gardeners" and Astyk and Newton's "farmers" are the same people - those of us growing food on a small scale for ourselves and our communities all over the world.

Nation is more about the politics -- the why-- while Resilient is more about the how. I recommend them both as good companions to one another.

Meat

Simon Fairlie

On the subject of small-scale polyculture farm systems that raise both animals and plants, another book that's rocked my world recently is Simon Fairlie's Meat.

Its cover, which looks like a somewhat cheesy hippie cookbook or maybe a children's book of the sort A Nation of Farmers references, belies the dense, academic nature of the book.

Fairlie's work is deeply detailed, thoughtful, and meticulously researched. He challenges some of the long-time core assumptions of the food justice and ethical eating movements and answers the question, "should we be farming animals" with a resounding "yes."

In my own transition in the past few years from vegetable grower to small-scale poultry and dairy goat keeper, seeing the ways that animals and vegetables are complimentary parts of a small farm or homestead system, I've experienced a dramatic shift in how I think about domestic animals that have been traditionally raised for food.

My experience as a producer of both vegetable and animal foods has given me a very different perspective on food, and in particular on foods from animal sources (milk, eggs, and meat). Producing vegetables, I've witnessed how animal inputs are essential to organic vegetable production, and thought about the fact that vegans eating only plant-based foods are quite possibly eating plant tissue that was fed with animal inputs (blood meal and manure, to name two). I've also killed thousands of insects as a vegetable grower, which has contributed to my shifting perspective on killing and food production. My experience producing eggs and milk has helped me understand the way that small-scale meat production is related in an essential way to sustainable dairy and egg operations.

Reading Fairlie's book was perfectly timed for me. I started reading it the week that I ate my first chicken in 22 years. After 20 years of strict vegetarianism and 2 years of adding fish back into my diet, I bought a whole, pastured, organic chicken from my friend Val's farm and ate it. I expect I'll write more on this subject soon, but suffice to say: it has been a big transition in my life back to the world of the omnivore. Simon Fairlie's respectful, careful, and thoughtful book has been a real gift in this transition. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the ethics of food.

The Small-Scale Poultry Flock

Harvey Ussery

Speaking of eggs and meat, I am thrilled in my first year of chicken-keeping to discover Harvey Ussery's amazing manual, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock.

This post is already on the extra-long side, so I won't go into great detail about this book, but suffice to say it is thorough, detailed, funny, smart, and grounded in immense respect and care for the animals that he's describing.

Ussery wastes no time in dispensing with the myth of industrial "organic" and "free-range" eggs and chicken and then gets down to the business of detailing exactly how to raise your own small flock. He covers topics I have never seen in other poultry how-to books, and like Carol Deppe, allows us to benefit from his many years of innovation, observation, and experimentation with poultry.

Not for the faint of heart or for those more on the "chickens as pets" side of the divide that runs through the chicken-keeping world, Ussery's book includes detailed (and graphic) information about butchering and processing chickens.

Returning to the theme of Fairlie's Meat, Ussery's book reminded me that we are not really being honest with ourselves if we think we can have eggs without chickens dying. Chicken lovers ordering day-old chicks from hatcheries are either contributing to male chicks being killed at the hatchery (if ordering pullets only) or will have some extra roosters to deal with down the line (if ordering "straight run" or unsexed chicks). In terms of true sustainability with farm and homestead systems, the issue of culling has to be addressed. We can either outsource it, which is what we're doing if we buy female chicks from a hatchery, or we can be responsible for it ourselves.

There's a lot more to say on this subject, a topic for another time, but for now I will leave you with a hearty recommendation of Harvey Ussery's book and the website he maintains with all sorts of interesting information, updates, and articles (The Modern Homestead).

So that's my wrap-up of my winter reading list...with a big thank-you to Ann Trigg for cultivating in me a love of the written world, and for some really great Christmas presents this year from Chelsea Green.

On Milk: Dear 16 year-old Me

Mona and baby Moonpie, two of our beloved Nubian dairy goats

Dear 16 year-old me,

Hey you, pulling your PETA literature out of the family mailbox on the rural route. Good for you. You're doing your best to do the right thing. I'm proud of you for realizing that food is important, and for grasping that the way most of the food you've been eating is produced is brutal, unhealthy, and morally repugnant.

Good job saying goodbye to your beloved quarter-pounder with cheese. I'm proud of you for believing with all of your heart that our small, daily actions are important and that personal decisions have the power to create social change. You are right. You will probably be happy to know that your 38 year-old counterpart still believes in that power. I so appreciate your passion and your conviction, and your desire to know the truth and do the right thing.

Specifically, you're right about the meat industry as it exists. The meat and milk and eggs you can find on the shelves of your supermarket in the late 1980s are beyond bad. But what you don't know now is that by the time you're in your thirties, the range of food options available to you will be very different. And your perspective will be more nuanced and complex. Things will have changed, and you will have changed. We could have a long conversation about meat, animals, vegetables, and health - I would love that and it would be spirited, contentious, and fun.

Maybe I'll continue to write to you here in this format that wasn't invented (the blog) on something called the internet, which was just a glimmer in Al Gore's eye back when you were reading Peter Singer's Animal Rights.

But for now, there's one thing in particular I hear you saying that I'd like to respond to: "humans are the only animals that drink another animal's milk." I know you think it's disgusting and unnatural, and it's also wrapped up in your new-found insight into factory-farmed dairy - where sick, exhausted milk cows are hooked up to milking machines, pumped full of antibiotics and hormones, and living miserable lives. Twenty years later, there are still articles circulating on Facebook (something else that hasn't even been dreamed of yet - Mark Zuckerberg is probably in preschool) about how unhealthy and unnatural milk consumption is for humans.

Yogurt from our goats' milk

But here is the answer that pops into my head twenty years later to your impassioned, heartfelt, and true statement:

Yes. Humans are the only animals that drink the milk of another animal. We are the only animals that do many of the things that we do. Let me name a few: cultivate gardens, plant seeds, cook, build fires to keep warm. There are many more examples.

Some of the things that we do that no other animals do are destructive and morally questionable. You and I do some of them anyway. An example in this category would be driving in cars on highways. Some of the things we do that no other animal does are not destructive or morally wrong just because they are unique to us. For example, we plant potatoes.

Would you be surprised to know, dear teenaged me, that the you of the future owns dairy animals? Our animals our healthy and happy, we milk by hand, and we drink the milk raw. I also plant potatoes, something no other animals do. I believe that the milk our goats produce, like the vegetables we grow in our gardens, is healthier and more nutritious than food you can find on supermarket shelves.

Potatoes au gratin with our goat milk and goat cheese. Cooked on a woodstove - note that no other animals chop firewood, construct woodstoves, or invented the cast iron skillet. Or have cameras or "The Joy of Cooking."

Oh dear sweet, sharp, scrappy, strident, loving, and well-intentioned me, here is what I'd most like to say to you: be as gentle with yourself and others as you are with the planet. Be open to change. Be open to changing your mind.

If you could know that after 20 years of strict vegetarianism and intermittent veganism you would suffer from debilitating health problems that very likely were caused or exacerbated by your diet, would you still make the same choices? Maybe so. And maybe those choices were the right ones at the time. Looking back, I think they probably were given your options at the time. But as clearly as you know that factory-farmed meat and dairy and eggs are wrong, I know that raising animals for eggs, milk, and meat can be part of an ethical way of life.

And as for milk, I say YES, humans stand alone as a species in having domesticated other animals in order to drink their milk and make cheese, yogurt, whipped cream, and butter from it. I'm so glad we do! Milk in its natural state - not factory-farmed, processed, and lifeless but fresh from the goat (or cow) is good food. Protein. Fats. Healthy bacteria. You can read a lot about it these days when information is so very accessible compared to the way it was in the late 1980s. (Here are a few things I've posted in recent years involving milk.)

I'm fascinated by the history of this relationship between humans and our domesticated animals, and grateful to be part of the continuing tradition of caring for these animals well on a small, homestead scale.

So there you have it, 16 year-old self. You will one day make butter. No other animal does that. And you will love that butter and know how good for you it is. You will know the animals that produce the milk you use are happier in your dairy-loving care than they would be just about anywhere else. And you will believe with all of your heart that it benefits the planet for people to produce their own food, including raising dairy animals for milk.

Oh, and you'll get to see R.E.M. live four or five times in the future (which is now my distant past), the prospect of which I know is pretty thrilling to you. Enjoy!

Love you!

~B

On the economy of plants and hard virtues

I am at home. Don't come with me.

You stay home too.

From "Stay Home" by Wendell Berry

On Wednesday night, I went next door to Warren Wilson College to see Wendell Berry with Christopher and my parents. The crowd at the college chapel where Mr. Berry spoke was so huge that we ended up watching and listening with a couple of hundred other people on a live feed from another building on campus. In his deeply humble and entirely unpretentious way, Mr. Berry read one of his short stories, At Home, and then answered a few questions from students.

At Home is a story of small details, a beautiful embodiment of Wendell Berry's ethic and way of life. His reading was slow, deliberate, and quiet. For me, listening to the story required a disciplined effort to slow my mind down and be still and patient. The pace of the story, and of Wendell Berry's whole way of being, was so radically slow compared to the pace of computers, cars, and smartphones in the world in which I usually live. Berry's words were so evocative and his pace so meditative that I almost felt like I was dreaming.

"He could not distinguish between himself and the land," Berry writes of the central character in "At Home." I emerged from "At Home" with a deep calling to my own home and land, to which I have been gradually becoming more and more inextricably connected over the past five years. Will there come a time when I can no longer distinguish myself from the land? I hope so.

After the reading was finished, Mr. Berry responded to questions from students - I first wrote "answered questions" and then realized that he was reluctant to provide "answers" in most cases, but instead gave subtle, thoughtful responses, often lightened with wry humor.

I was jotting notes as he spoke, still moving somewhat slowly after being immersed in the world of Berry's short story, but here are a few of my favorite moments:

In response to questions from students about how we can find our way out of the ecological predicament we have created: "Problem solving is not applying the maximum force as relentlessly as possible. It requires patience, resignation, and other hard virtues." And later, "No one knows the answer. Don't trust anyone who says they do. The answer will have to be lived out." And finally, "We are working from the inside, necessity is working from the outside. The world is not going to continue to yield what we have come to expect of it."

In response to a question about how "people of faith" might be involved in the environmental movement: "It's hard to think of a person who doesn't have faith in something. The human mind is by nature faithful."

He encouraged students to "Get your language right. Call things by their right names." He talked about health in communities, referencing Aldo Leopold's concept of "land community" (a concept he fleshes out in more detail in his essay "Conservation and Local Economy").

When asked about Occupy Wall Street, he reminded us that "great public movements must be accompanied by local, small, private acts." He also noted that when we are told, "inform yourself," we should remember that "to inform is to shape inwardly."

He talked about making local food economies "that will be the kindest to the home landscapes of the world."

At the end of the evening, Mr. Berry repeated twice what he called one of his "articles of faith": "Things aren't going to get so bad that someone who is willing can't make it a little better."

That is the kind of hope, small and persistent, that I can feel resonating in my heart and bones. Thank you, Wendell Berry.

More from Wendell Berry:

"We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral. We must see the error of our effort to live by fire, by burning the world in order to live in it. There is no plainer symptom of our insanity than our avowed intention to maintain by fire an unlimited economic growth. Fire destroys what nourishes it and so in fact imposes severe limits on any growth associated with it. The true source and analogue of our economic life is the economy of plants, which never exceeds natural limits, never grows beyond the power of its place to support it, produces no waste, and enriches and preserves itself by death and decay. We must learn to grow like a tree, not like a fire."

Read a longer excerpt from Berry's essay "Conservation and Local Economy," here.

Read the essay "Word and Flesh" here.

Read a profile of Wendell Berry in "Grist" here.

Occupy the Pantry. . .

. . .and the fridge, and the cupboards, and the stovetop, and the plate. And while we're at it, let's occupy the pasture and the hen house and the dairy barn and the vegetable garden.

Watching the Occupy Wall Street movement crop up, proliferate, and bloom over the past few weeks has been good for my soul.

Enough has been written about corporate control of food systems and how it serves the 1% while harming the planet, our health, and workers. I don't need to add my own long diatribe here. Suffice to say that the multinational for-profit food industry is part of the problem that OWS is rallying against. Industrial agriculture and the food policy it has spawned by way of corporate control of our political process contributes to hunger, pollution, and the destruction of small farms and farmland.

So taking control of your own food supply and working for community food justice is part of the solution. And it feels good to be aware of doing that one small part while a bigger movement grows all around us. I like thinking of planting lettuce in our winter gardens and gathering eggs in the morning and canning tomato sauce as actions in solidarity with the Occupiers all over the world.

Some of my favorite posts on related notes:

• Occupy Your Kitchen (great post with lots of tips for wresting your food supply from corporate control by Laura Everage/Family Eats)

• Revolution Begins In Your Kitchen: Occupy Wall Street from Your Kitchen (Lindsay Curren at Transition Voice)

• Occupy the Pasture (Steph Larsen at Grist)

Along the same lines, check out this great Ted Talk on gardening as a revolutionary, subversive activity:

Roger Doiron reminds us, among other things, that "food is a form of energy...but it's also a form of power. And when we encourage people to grow some of their own food, we're encouraging them to take power into their own hands. Power over their diet, power over their health, and some power over their pocketbooks. And that's quite subversive because we are also necessarily talking about taking that power away from someone else -- from other actors in society who currently have power over food and health. You can think about who some of those actors might be." I also love his statement that "gardening is a healthy gateway drug to other forms of food freedom."

To wrap it all up, here's a great quote from the ever-amazing, Frances Moore Lappé, one of my heroes, whose recent article in The Nation I highly recommend:

‎"At its best, [the food] movement encourages us to “think like an ecosystem,” enabling us to see a place for ourselves connected to all others, for in ecological systems “there are no parts, only participants,” German physicist Hans Peter Duerr reminds us. With an “eco-mind” we can see through the productivist fixation that inexorably concentrates power, generating scarcity for some, no matter how much we produce. We’re freed from the premise of lack and the fear it feeds. Aligning food and farming with nature’s genius, we realize there’s more than enough for all."
~Frances Moore Lappé, "The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities"

Local Food and Climate Change: Every Day is Blog Action Day

To celebrate today's blog action day, I'm posting photos of our recent stint selling at the West Asheville farmers market (see below).

Decreasing your foodprint is a great small step that individual people and families can take to help slow climate change. But individual actions--low-impact eating and living, conserving energy and resources, consuming less, reducing your carbon footprint --are a drop in the bucket. These actions are inherently political, but they are not enough on their own.

In addition to individual action, the world needs our collective political action for immediate and large-scale change. I'm grateful for and impressed with 350.org's organizing work building power, raising awareness, and advocating for such change.

In nine days, on October 24, 350.org is holding an International Day of Climate Action. The organizers of Blog Action Day are also putting forward a petition urging President Obama to make the US a leader in solving the problem that we have led the world in creating. Add your signature here.

Individual choices like eating local food and large-scale political action like participating in 350's Day of Action are essential, but there's more: we must build new systems to replace the dysfunctional one that's caused the climate crisis in the first place. We need to build the lifeboats, create the world we want to live in, and set up alternate structures to replace the crumbling ones that have caused so much damage to the planet. Building local food systems is part of that creative work.

So here's to actions small and large. May the systems of life on planet be healed by all of our creative individual and collective acts. Including these very small ones:

Food Not Lawns at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave!

Today Michelle Obama and twenty-three fifth graders will begin digging to create a vegetable garden at the White House. 

Woooooohoooo!

It gets better: 

Raised beds. Compost. Bee hives. The whole family pulling weeds. 

Read the New York Times article here!

Read my previous posts on the subject here and here.

Happy Equinox, and here's to a planet in balance and life in balance.

Food Justice For All

"Food justice is everyone having enough to eat; healthy food for our children; food that doesn't contain harmful things that we don't know about; freedom to grow our own food; ability to buy food directly from farmers; fair wages for those who grow, cook and work with food." 

~ The Urban & Environmental Policy Institute 

Photo credit: AP/David Adame

Lately, in food and gardening circles, there has been more and more talk of food justice.  Even before the severity of the economic meltdown began to be apparent, local food, clean food, and slow food movements were being pushed from within and from without to address issues of access to healthy food and justice for farm workers.  At the big Slow Food USA gathering in September, lack of attention to labor rights, food elitism, and food justice in general were rightly called out.  These issues were finally brought to the Slow Food USA table last fall, but people have been organizing around them for many years around the world.

I think that I first became aware of the concept of "food justice" when I read World Hunger: Twelve Myths by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins for a class in college.  ReadingTwelve Myths was one of those pivotal experiences in life -- it provided a lens through which I have seen the world ever since.  Beginning to understand the ways that food and social justice are related was similar for me to acquiring the lens of feminist theory: it gave me tools which with to understand the world around me and forever altered the way I would process information. 

Growing up in a family where Cesar Chavez was a household hero meant I had some awareness of farmworker rights from early on.  In the time I spent working as a union organizer, I began to understand labor issues around food -- namely the systematic violations of the basic human rights of the people who grow and harvest the food on our plates.

Twelve Myths, and the work of Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy, with which Lappe has been associated for many years, are still critical sources for me when thinking about the politics of food.  Farmworkers' rights organizations (several of which are listed in the resources at the bottom of this post) continue to expand my understanding of labor and human rights issues related to food.

Photo credit:  Farmworker Support Committee

My participation in the local food movement has been largely driven by a kind of personal "triple bottom line" -- wanting to eat the healthiest food possible; wanting to make the most ecologically responsible food choices; and wanting to know the people who grow and harvest my food and value their work, which produces the food on my plate.  

It has been encouraging to see the new attention being paid to food justice issues from within the local/slow/organic food movements lately.  Coincidentally or not, several "food challenge" projects have also cropped up lately to document the difficulty of feeding the family in the economic system that we live in -- particularly in light of the declines in wages and employment coupled with ever-escalating food prices.  Two that I'm aware of are:

The Working Poor Diet

and 

The One Dollar Diet Project

These food challenge diaries expose the injustice of hunger in lands of plenty (Canada and the US) and draw attention to the economic realities that so many people are up against in their day-to-day food lives.

It seems that the recent economic downturn, which we're told by President Obama could well turn into an economic catastrophe of Great Depression-proportions, has created an environment where the value of growing food, community food security, and food justice are on the tips of tongues all over the country.  

Some good reading along these lines: 

8 Ways to Eat Well in Hard Times

Four Food Groups of the Apocalypse on Food Justice Blog

Photo credit: Student Action with Farmworkers

Other reccomended food justice resources:

Civil Eats

Food First

"The Food Justice Movement: Trying to Break the Food Chains" by Mark Winston Griffith

National Farmworker Alliance

One Silver Lining of the Economic Black Cloud

Seed Sales Are Up

From USA Today of all places:

"Amid the Washington talk of "shovel-ready" recession projects, it appears few projects are more shovel-ready than backyard gardens. Veggie seed sales are up double-digits at the nation's biggest seed sellers this year."

Click here for the full article

One step closer to a Victory Garden at the White House?

Back before the election, I posted about Michael Pollan's open letter to the next president, and about the movement to plant a "Victory Garden" on the grounds of the White House.  

I read an article last week about the Obamas bringing a chef to the White House who it turns out is involved in local food circles.  This very hopeful news in terms of our new president's awareness about issues related to food, hunger, sustainability, and the politics of food, and buried in the article is a mention of the possibilty of a kitchen garden at the White House:

"Mr. Kass’s appointment signals changes at the White House that should please chefs like Alice Waters, who have lobbied the Obamas to set an example for the rest of the country by emphasizing food that is healthy, local and sustainable. It further suggests that a vegetable garden on the White House grounds, another of Ms. Waters’ dreams, could be on the horizon."

Read the full article here

Symbolic though it may be, having someone cooking good food in the White House and maybe even growing food on some of that copious lawn is good news for all of us who care about where food comes from; who has access to good, clean, healthy food; and changing the culture of eating in the U. S. of A.

Grow Food

See all of my "Obamacons" and make your own here.

I love the idea of creating these Obama-esque images to replace the cult of personality/idol worship aspect of Obamamania with power-to-the-people.  What excites me most about the Obama presidency is the increased potential for power to spread out among more of us, for all of us to be agents of change, for all of us to put hope into action.  I am not counting on Barack to fix everything or even to do the right thing all of the time.  I am counting on us to hold him accountable and wield our own power to make positive change in the world.  

At an anti-Prop 8 rally, my friend K. and I inadvertantly ended up holding a banner that said "People of Faith for Just Relationships." We laughed about it because we are people of faith, deep faith, but not necessarily in the way that the words on the banner were meant. I have faith not so much in a "higher power" but in a deeper, broader, more universal power--the power that resides in all of us and in all life.  I have faith in the power of community, of creativity, of the earth and her living systems, of people coming together. I believe in the healing and redemptive power of love, compassion, and active hope. I have faith in our power to heal and to regenerate, and in the planet's power to heal and regenerate.  

So here's to being a person of faith ... and to an ethic of shared power and power-from-within replacing the ethic of power-over.

And more power to ya!

Are Monsanto seeds in YOUR favorite seed catalog?

The various and sundry evil deeds of Monsanto have been thoroughly documented and much discussed in a variety of media over the past decade. The sprawling corporation is an agent of harm in so many diverse and horrifying ways that their name has become synonomous in many circles with profit-driven destruction of living systems.

Monsanto is considered by some to be the single most unethical and harmful investment possible. They are known, among other things, as the corporation that sues farmers for inadvertantly growing food contaminated with gene drift from Monsanto's GMO crops. If Monsanto's genetically modified seed cross-polinates with a farmer's crops, the farmer becomes a victim of GMO pollution, and then to add insult to injury Monsanto sues the farmer for theft of the corporation's intellectual property. The absurdity is almost laughable if it weren't so scary.

If you need any MORE evidence of Monsanto's evil: they are the world's leading promoter of "frankenfoods" - genetically modified food plants, as well as so-called "terminator technology," Roundup, Roundup Ultra (sprayed indiscriminately in the drug wars in the Andes and Colombia), and Roundup Ready plants. They are also the proud owners of rGHB, the bovine hormone that contaminates most commercial milk and dairy products. I could go on.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Monsanto seeds are being sold in a number of my standby seed catalogs, including: Territoral Seeds, Cooks Garden, Burpee, Johnny's, Shumway, and more. Here is a great thread on Freedom Gardens with information about all of the seed companies that carry Monsanto seeds--this thread is a really informative discussion with lots of factual information about which companies and which varieties are coming from Monsanto, and what we can do to avoid buying them.

For more information about why we should avoid buying them, here is the Fedco Seeds backgrounder on Fedco's decision not to carry any seeds from Monsanto subsidiary Seminis. I will be buying all of my seeds from Fedco, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), Baker Creek, and Seeds of Change this season. Southern Exposure, Baker Creek, and SSE are always my main sources, but this year I'm cutting out any catalogs that do business with Monsanto.

"No to Monsanto" crop circle cut in protest of Monsanto by farmers in the Phillipines.

Image courtesty of Vanity Fair

For more information on the evils of Monsanto, and organized resistance to their actions and policies:

"Millions Against Monsanto" campaign of the Organic Consumers Union

"Monsanto's Harvest of Fear" Vanity Fair article, May 2008

A great post on Monsanto from "We don't buy it", an excellent blog about "one family's quest to quit buying new stuff."

And finally, here is the fabulous Vandana Shiva on Monsanto and intellectual property:

"When seed, for example, becomes patented by Monsanto, when a farmer saves seed on their own land--a duty in an ecological world view--that saving of seed is now an intellectual property crime. It is treated as theft. And it fact it is because of this extremely outrageous action that I started to save seeds. . . .Seed exchange is treated as theft. If I give you seed so that you can grow a nice vegetable in your garden, that is treated as theft of intellectual property.

But what is worse: . . .when your genetically engineered seeds are introduced, you know, they hybridize, they pollinate, so they contaminate with the genetic traits. Now in environmental law, when I spread pollution, I must pay. . . .But when you have patents on seeds, when the genes spread, you don't have to pay, you in fact own the other person's crop now. This is what happened to a Canadian farmer called Percy Schmeiser. It has happened to 1,500 American farmers who have been sued by Monsanto after Monsanto contaminated their crops."

~Vandana Shiva

"Farmer in Chief" -- Michael Pollan's Open Letter to the Next President

Michael Pollan has an amazing new article in the New York Times Magazine: "Farmer In Chief".

Addressed to "Dear Mr. President Elect," Pollan's letter briefs the next president (pictured above, let's hope!)about food policy and lays out the case that this will be one of the most significant sets of issues that the new president will address during his tenure.

Here's a snip:

"Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we’re not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized."

Pollan outlines specific ways that the next president can advance federal policies to encourage polyculture and discourage petrofertilizers, de-incentivize Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and factory farming, encourage Americans to reduce their meat consumption, preserve farmland, reregionalize the food system, and change the culture and politics of food in the US. The article includes specific steps that the federal government can take in all of these areas. In short, IT ROCKS. Michael Pollan strikes again with a perfectly-timed piece synthesizing and simplifying complex issues related to the politics of food.

Pollan ends the article with a fabulous idea:

"The White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden. When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. ... Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently."

Read the whole article here.

Read more about the movement to revive victory gardens here.